My pasted reply to a yapc mailing list message:
Missed this BoF too. I've written a lot about my experiences with
Phoenix.PM. As far as I can tell, the key ingredients are:
* organizer with the right personality
* audiance happy with social meetings or else a few people willing to present over and over year after year
* central location to minimize excuses from people who have families to go home to
* core people to attend so the thing doesn't bottom out while it's ramping up
We had a mix of people hoping the meetings would have tangible,
immediate improvements to their career (more immediate than teaching
them awesome Perl hackery, such as recruiters standing by),
maintenance programmers whose life with Perl just sucks and won't
be made by happy that doesn't just take a rotorooter to their
codebase, weirdos like Marlana from Fight Club who just go to every
meeting in town but never actually do anything or have any personal
interest in any of it, and hip kids looking for the cool thing.
Most of these groups saw we had nothing to offer (only awesome
technical presentations) and never came back.
-scott
