In the past several years, I’ve taken the opportunity to attend meetings of a number of Boston-area special interest groups. These are groups where people interested in various specific topics meet in person to discuss whatever is on their mind. I enjoy getting to meet people in person who I’ve previously only met on-line, as well as getting to meet completely new people. I’d like to introduce you to some of those groups, and share some of my thoughts on the motivation (or lack thereof) for attending groups like this.

The first group I took part in was ***MacWoburn|http://www.macwoburn.org/***. MacWoburn is a user group for Mac users in the greater Woburn area. It was a convenient group for me to attend for a while, beause after graduating from ***Gordon|http://www.gordon.edu/***, I lived in Woburn for a few years, and the meetings were held right down the street from my apartment. I even volunteered to help run their website and mailing list, which I continue to do today. I’ve even given a couple of presentations there – once several years back I did a review of MacInTax software (and I think ***BMAC|http://www.bmac.org/*** stole my tagline for the presentation for their upcoming meeting…), and I also did a presentation on ***Blogging on the Mac|http://prwdot.org/blogging/***. The MacWoburn group tends to cater more to the novice crowd, so I don’t attend very many meetings these days.

Since I’m a ***Perl|http://www.perl.org/*** programmer by trade (and by hobby), I took an interest in the ***Boston Perl Mongers|http://boston.pm.org/*** group. I did attend one of their meetings several years ago, but haven’t attended any since then. Perhaps I was having a bad day, perhaps the group was having a bad day, maybe I’m just not as intensely into Perl as the other people who were there, but for whatever reason, I just didn’t enjoy myself. Maybe I’ll give them another chance some time soon. Maybe not.

I’d also heard a lot about Boston’s big Mac user group, ***BMAC|http://www.bmac.org/***, so I checked them out. Their meetings tend to be pretty huge, and the agenda is very well laid out. The atmosphere isn’t quite as personable, but they do sometimes have interesting topics and can attract bigger name speakers, so sometimes they are worth a visit.

***Boston Linux and UNIX|http://www.blu.org/*** is a very savvy group. I’ve attended one of their Linux ***Installfests|http://www.blu.org/installfests/*** (***this one, I think|http://www.blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2000-ifest8***), and I even did a presentation on ***Mac OS X for UNIX Users|http://www.blu.org/cgi-bin/calendar/2002-aug***, which was a lot of fun. I don’t use Linux any more, and I’m not as into the UNIXy topics as I used to be, so I haven’t been to any of their meetings recently.

A fairly recent development for me is attending local, smaller scale ‘Meetups’. I found out about ***Meetup.com|http://www.meetup.com/*** some time last year, and started looking into local groups. Meetups tend to be fairly small groups, organized in an on-the-fly sort of fashion. The first one I attended was a ***Boston WordPress Meetup|http://wordpress.meetup.com/10/*** in December. The meetup was well attended, mostly, I think, because ***PhotoMatt|http://photomatt.net/*** was there. I had serious doubts of its ability to maintain inertia after that meeting, and as I suspected, they haven’t met again since then. A more successful group has been the ***Boston Weblogger Meetup|http://blog.meetup.com/3/***. I’ve attended several of their meetings, and have definitely enjoyed them a great deal. There are a plethora of tech-related Meetups listed ***here|http://www.meetup.com/topics/intech/***, each with varying degrees of success and attendance.

It was at the Boston Weblogger Meetup that I learned about the ***Berkman Thursday Meetings|http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/thursdays***. This is a group that meets at Harvard Law School’s ***Berkman Center for Internet and Society|http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/***. Though it was formed by folks from Harvard, it has expanded to be an all-inclusive blog meeting. They meet every Thursday, and their meetings tend to be more on the in-depth side, where the Weblogger Meetups are fairly casual. I attended my first Thursday Meeting last night, and had a great time. I’ll certainly be attending again, though I’m not sure if I can afford to go down every Thursday night.

In addition to all of these in-person meetings, there are a ton of online communities devoted to Boston. There are mailing lists and forums for all of the above groups, many of which are populated by people who rarely, if ever, attend the in-person meetings. There is the ***Universal Hub|http://www.universalhub.com/*** community, a ***Drupal|http://www.drupal.org/***-based forum that aggregates a plethora of Boston-area blogs and provides forums for discussing Boston-area topics. There is even the tiny, sparse ***Boston|http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/boston*** forum at the popular site ***BroadbandReports.com|http://www.broadbandreports.com/***.

One thing that interests me about all of these groups is the amazing lack of overlap between them. Sure, I understand that not everybody is social. And I understand that one can only take part in so many activities. But out of all of the groups that I participate in, with the broad total membership base, I can count on one hand the number of people that I’ve seen regularly overlapping between groups, at least in terms of physical meeting attendance. It’s easy enough to be part of any number of groups ‘virtually’, but I’m talking about actually seeing the same person at more than one meeting. Maybe there are just too many meetings, or maybe I’m just not observant.

I’m also somewhat surprised at the lack of knowledge and interaction between complementary groups. Some times I’ll attend one group, and in the course of discussing the topic at hand, I’ll mention another relevant group – and some people will have never heard about it! Other times, I’ve suggested to group leaders that they try cross-promoting with other groups… only to be met by thundrous silence. There could be tremendous build-up in interest and attendance in groups if they would spend a little time promoting themselves. But maybe they don’t want that. Maybe they’re happy being in their own small tribes, keeping to themselves, ignoring the others. I suppose that is their right. It just seems a bit silly to me.

Anyway, I would encourage everyone who has a special interest, and isn’t currently meeting up with any face-to-face groups related to that interest, to check out what local options are available for you. If there aren’t any, why not create one yourself? ***Meetup|http://www.meetup.com/*** is the perfect place to do that.