Results of a survey of the SoCal Piggies group

My colleague Warren Runk had the idea of putting together a survey to be sent to the mailing list of the SoCal Python Interest Group (aka SoCal Piggies), with the purpose of finding out which topics or activities would be most interesting to the members of the group in terms of future meetings. We had 10 topics in the survey, and people responded by choosing their top 5. We also had free-form response fields for 2 questions: "What do you like most about the meetings?" and "What meeting improvements are most important to you?".

We had 26 responses. Here are the votes results for the 10 topics we proposed:

#1 (18 votes): "Good practice, pitfall avoidance, and module introductions for beginners"


#2 (17 votes): "5 minute lightning talks"

#3 - #4 (15 votes): "Excellent code examples from established Python projects" and "New and upcoming Python open source projects"

#5 (14 votes): "30 minute presentations"

#6 (13 votes): "Ice breakers/new member introductions"

#7 (12 votes): "Algorithm discussions and dissections"


#8 (11 votes): "Good testing practices and pointers to new methods/tools"


#9 (10 votes): "Moderated relevant/cutting edge general tech discussions"


#10 (9 votes): "Short small group programming exercises"

It's pretty clear that people are interested most of all in good Python programming practices and practical examples of 'excellent' code from established projects. Presentations are popular too, with lightning talks edging the longer 30-minute talks. A pretty good percentage of the people attending our meetings are beginners, so we're going to try to focus on making our meetings more beginner-friendly.

As far as what people like most about the meetings, here are a few things:

• "I love hearing about how Python is being used in multiple locations throughout large corporations.  It helps me to promote Python at every opportunity when I can say that Python is being used at Acme Corp for XYZ!"
• "High level introductions to Python modules. Often this is not the main thrust of a  talk, but the speaker chose some module for a given task and that helps me expand my horizon."
• "Becoming aware of how various companies use python, which libraries and tools are used most often, the opportunity to connect with members during breaks."
• "I like being exposed to things I don't normally see at work of if I've seen them I get to see them from a different angle.  "
• "I don't have other geeks at my office so I like having the chance to hang out and get to know other Python programmers."
• ...and many people expressed their satisfaction in seeing Raymod Hettinger's presentation at Disney Animation Studios (thanks to Paul Hildebrandt for putting that together!)

Here's what people said when asked about possible improvements:

• "More best practices and module intros."
• "Keep the meetings loose, don't have too many controls. "
• "In addition to the aptly proposed "ice-breakers / introductions" how can we current members more-actively welcome beginners?"
• "Time (and some format) to discuss the issues brought up in the talks. Sometimes I think it'd be useful for the group to get more directly involved in vetting/providing critique for some of the decisions a speaker made. Controversial points made in talks are great, but sometimes I think everyone might benefit from a few other perspectives."
• "Friendlier onboarding of new members would be great."
• "Keeping the total noobs in mind"
• "I would like introductions. I have met a couple people at each of the meetings that I have attended, but I would also like to know who else is there."
• "I would like the opportunity to meet resourceful programmers and learn techniques and abilities that I can't pick up from youtube or online tutorials!"
• "I think we should try to come up with and stick with a consistent format. I like the discussion-style presentation so long as it does not detract from the topic at hand. I think we need to make sure that people stick with shorter presentations, so that there is plenty of time for Q&A without the risk of running on too long.  30 minutes should really be 30 minutes! "
• "It would be good to identify the difficulty/skill level of a presentation ahead of time so that beginners are not scared off or at least know what they're getting into. Perhaps we could try to always mix it up by warming up with a beginner/intermediate preso and follow up with an intermediate/advanced."

I think you can see a theme here -- friendliness and attention towards beginners is a wish that many people have. I believe in the past we tended to ignore this side in our meetings, so we definitely need to do a better job at it.

We had a meeting last night where we discussed some of these topics. We tried to appoint point persons for given topics. These persons would be responsible for doing research on that topic (for example 'New and upcoming Python open source projects') and give a short presentation to the group at every meeting, while also looking for other group members to delegate this responsibility to in the future. I think this 'lieutenant' system will work well, but time will tell. My personal observation from the 7 years I've been organizing this group is that the hardest part is to get people to volunteer in any capacity, and most of all in presenting to the group. But this infusion of new ideas is very welcome, and I hope it will invigorate the participation in our group.

I hope the results of this survey and the feedback we got will be useful to other Python user groups out there.

I want to thank Warren Runk and Danny Greenfeld for their feedback, ideas and participation in making the SoCal Piggies Group better.