So it's london.pm's 5th birthday party this evening. To be pedantic we're actually celebrating the 5th anniversary of our first meeting (and, strictly speaking, the party should have been yesterday).
Google shows that the idea was first mentioned on March 28th 1998. I think we got a mailing list of sorts going pretty soon after that, so it looks like it took us about four months to decide on the date of our first meeting. Our organisational skills never really improved.
But it's a great five years. Plenty of good ideas have come out of it (and more than a few pretty dodgy ones). At YAPC::Europe, Gabor presented some brief results from his Perl Monger survey and he concluded that we were the biggest and most active group measured by all sorts of criteria. I also believe that we were also the first non-US group.
When I made that first post to clpm, I never dreamt that we'd be as successful as we have. Thanks to everyone who has been involved in any way.
