Welcome aboard!
The group is still active and I post meetings from time to time, and we had a big one along side AITP (another IT social club) in February . Most Spiceworks groups only meet once a year. I was doing it once a month, but some months people couldn’t come, and some others a decent amount of people came. It’s become typical over the last two years that when merging meetings with AITP, instead of seeing it as a great way to network and meet more IT people, some Spiceworks members don’t want to go because they’ve gone in the past to merged meetings such as the February the year before, and they ignore my Spiceworks table with the obvious Spiceworks merch on it and then say nobody from Spiceworks was there and whine about it. As if it’s horrible to meet with other IT people you don’t know as opposed to meeting with IT people you don’t know, how ironic. Then they post on the group things like “I went last year and nobody was there” and this only hurts the situation because people were there, and new people don’t want to come because they think it means they’ll be alone.
Not only was Spiceworks there, but multiple people, including the other group admin kyrilc was also there. It’s more of a situation of people not wanting to look at what’s going on in their surroundings, so lucky for them we weren’t rattle snakes I guess.
If nothing interesting or big comes up either that I can organise or we can ride on AITP’s coat tails, then we basically just do the one in February because that one always had a lot of IT people from the local area. A lot of AITP people also use Spiceworks, they are just not as active in this community. Hell, it’s Wichita, it’s not exactly the IT mecca, but I’ve tried (and still try) to at least give people the experience it’s medina (play on words with mecca).
We’ve also done a couple of meetings with the Kansas City group, though that’s a little far drive for most Wichita people, so that was more of a special thing and is not common (and I don’t consider it a thing where it ever counts as one of our real official meetings since a lot of people can’t make it).
So, basically I’ve only been posting them when AITP has something interesting going on and when AITP’s meeting coordinator posts their meetings ahead of time. He’s a good guy, but I dislike how he’ll post a meeting sometimes 12 hours or less before the meeting starts, giving no one time to prepare or schedule anything.
Spiceworks meetings here are never big, even though we have a lot of IT people, so that’s why we often hold meetings with AITP. We can talk to Spiceworks people any time we want to here online, the purpose of meeting in person is to network and make better social connections, and that’s why it’s good to hold meetings with similar groups. AITP also contains a lot of people from other groups like the local AS/400 group.
I’m always interested to hear any ideas anyone has or if they’re interested in hosting a meeting to present something or whatever. You can always send me a message here and we can talk about it. I’m open to holding meetings any time anyone wants to get together, I have places in mind which are decent and know the people to call so I can handle all of that for you as well.
I may be group admin, but I’m not group dictator, I’m only interested in helping us network together and in coordinating things. I leave it up to all of you, in addition to myself, to make meetings happen (in a philosophical sense), because it’s our group.
