Hi, I’m starting a python user group in Leiden, The Netherlands https://pythonleiden.nl. I would like to add some ‘interactive’ place where people can say hi online. I thought: maybe we should get a discord. But a discord with a small group of people is not so nice. Then I thought, maybe we should get a channel on the Python discord, or a spot on discuss.python.org. However, in both places, in the structure of the discord channels and the d.p.o topics, there is not a great place to fit local initiatives in. Would it be possible to create a spot like that? Should I just sign up for a facebook account and create a facebook group? Tips are welcome!
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- I would challenge the claim that discords with small numbers of users aren’t nice. As long as at least a few are active (and one moderator) I think that can work quite well.
- I don’t think discourse (i.e. discuss.python.org) is a good place for forming subcommunities, it’s structure doesn’t quite fit it. You could try setting up your own discourse, but I don’t really like discourse for casual conversations, discord is a lot better in that regard.
- I don’t have any connections to the discord moderators, but IMO creating a channel for each local community that asks which a channel-local moderator and non-english language is not too much to ask - you would just need to guarantee to the moderators that you are actively monitoring a channel with a language they don’t speak.
I agree with what Cornelius said. I’m in several Discord servers with a small number of users, and they all serve their purpose just fine. What are the specific reasons that you think a small Discord server wouldn’t be nice?
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Well, for one, we’re just starting the group. So if people decide to check out the group and find just one or two people active in the server it looks ‘weird’. If it would be a channel on the buzzing python server, it already looks different.
There are no ‘meta’ channels at all on the python discord, so I don’t really see where I could even ask this question but I’ll just pop in the main channel and ask about if this would be possible.
I guess alternatively we’ll just set up our own discord. Thanks for your feedback!
Great to hear about your new group!
I’ve been helping organise the Helsinki Python since we restarted this spring. My first bit of advice is to find some more co-organisers to help out. We heard 3-4 is a good number, started with three, and during our first meetup asked if anyone would like to help and a fourth joined. We’re now five. It makes things much easier when we can share the work.
We’ve been using Discord to organise things. We make a private channel per monthly meetup, and have some general ones too. And in the summer we opened some public channels too. There’s about 140 members now. It’s not the busiest place, but it’s good there’s a place for for our community to come and discuss things. We made a channel and leaderboard for Advent of Code and there’s some daily chat about that.
If you’re considering using Meetup.com, the PSF has a “Meetup Pro Network” you can join, which means they cover the fees. Let me know if you’d like more info about this.
See also https://www.conferencechats.org which has a Discord and monthly calls for organisers to talk with other organisers (not just conference organisers).
Good luck!
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Thanks for your answer and your pointers! I’m not sure about Meetup but I guess it can be great to use to reach other people. Amsterdam had two python user groups which are now defunct, but they had active meetup groups, and I guess I also discovered them via Meetup.com myself. Amsterdam is only 30 minutes by train from Leiden, so we might also be able to attract some Amsterdam pythonista’s to our Leiden group
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I’ve now set up a separate Discord-server for our Python Leiden User Group → Python Leiden User Group
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I’ve been wondering how the meetup has been going, that’s outstanding!
What were some key parts that helped it grow so much from your perspective? How did you reach out to your local community? And how does the discord membership compare to the in-person meetup attendance?
Relatedly, what do you get to do that’s special and celebrates the local community?
Congrats! I’m excited to see it grow and give pythonist’s a stage to celebrate and encourage one another!
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Thanks!
It helped that we could continue using the existing Meetup group that the original organiser had kindly kept active just in case, even if there weren’t events happening. The group is 12 years old and there were some 1,700 members to begin with, and that’s shot up by 600 since we restarted things.
We get about 50-75 at each meetup. I think the announcement emails to the group are enough to get the word out and usually “sell out” the event pretty quickly, but we also announce on our little website, LinkedIn, a big Finnish tech Slack, in the Events category here, on Mastodon and sometimes submit to python.org. We’re also experimenting with announcing first in our Discord before these other places.
Hmm, one thing we do is have a short quiz each time, it’s a fun way to involve the audience. But one of the biggest benefits is just getting the local Python folk in one room (and a pub afterwards) to meet and chat with each other.
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