We had the first Wellington.pm meeting last night after a long period of inactivity. My 'Introduction to Perl' talk seemed to go down pretty well. The intention was to attract some 'new blood' to the group and that seemed to be successful despite my initial fears that people might be put off by the 'preaching to the choir' angle.
One gimmick that paid off was that I planned to reward people for finding fault with my slides. There were one or two deliberate errors (and one or two not so deliberate errors) and none went unnoticed. Once people realised that I was throwing out chocolate bars to people who spoke up, it developed into the sort of interactive session I'd hoped for. Most people didn't know too many others so it was good to let some of the personalities shine through.
The other thing that went really well was that we got some volunteers for future talks including one for next month.
