The original idea of user groups was to help professional and/or people of common interest in some area or product e.g. Linux, MySQL, PHP etc. This was because the people held the knowledge and it was often the only way to discuss issues that you found during the day that you could not solve. There was no email, no web, no Wikipedia or Google.

However, now there is easy access to problem solving with Google and email and all the resources of the internet at hand. This means that either the user group's purpose has to change or they cease to exist.

For some areas, I have already seen these groups cease to exist. So how do they change their purpose? Looking at our LUG it works very much the same way - there can still be queries that are unsolved by querying Google, and can be solved by collaboration at the LUG. The biggest use however, is interactive knowledge sharing, particularly for new or complex areas. For beginners, it is important to have talks and demo new applications or techniques and let them ask questions. For knowledgeable people, looking at quirks in how things work, or implementing tricky or new features is reassuring before trying it out themselves either at work or home.

So what is the outcome? It comes down to the will of the people in the group. Some will simply find it no longer of value and it will close down. Other groups can see the value and participate to make it better and useful. Sometimes this involves cross-networking with other groups. This can be seen with groups such as PHP, Python and Perl groups combining with MySQL and PostgreSQL groups once a quarter for example to talk about common areas of interest. The point is that the LUG is only as strong as the people who are willing to make it work. Once people stop working together to make it go forward, then the group will gradually die and cease to exist.

The human aspect that Jonathon points out was also echoed by others. Predictably, my “what can your LUG do for you” evoked a natural response of correcting the question to be “what can you do for your LUG?”

Is that rephrasing on the money? Read on!

CONTINUED