I feel a quiet satisfaction every time I see a post on Wellington.pm or Sydney.pm these days (I'm subscribed to all the lists in Oceania). Wellington PM was deathly quiet 12 months ago and Sydney PM lost all it's members early last year when PM.org changed to using Mailman.
Yet today they're both alive and active.
Wellington PM revived when I sent out a "let's introduce ourselves" note to all my PM lists. When the Wellinton PMers noticed how numerous they were, they decided to start meeting again.
Sydney PM revived more recently, when I emailed each person I'd ever seen post and invited them to resubscribe. Surprisingly it appeared that the list-owner managed to get a copy of my invite as well even though pm.org's address for him was wrong. The first meeting in a long, long time was a few weeks ago.
Encouraging activity in the local PM groups is good business sense for Perl Training Australia and, as a result, we encourage all of our attendees to join (or jump-start) their local PM group. This has been much more successful for Melbourne PM, than others, generally.
It's more than that as well, though. I've learned a lot from being a Melbourne PM member and I want to help other people have that opportunity too.
Of course, not all of my endeavours at resurrecting have been so successful. I know that the Brisbane and Canberra PMs are populated, but they're very, very quiet. Perhaps we should offer tenders for running OSDC, maybe that'd wake them up. :)
The reason that Canberra.PM is so quiet is that nobody is there is allowed to mention what they do for a job, or how they're using Perl — let alone ask for help or give a presentation.
