A Few Good Men

One of the oddities of India's "silicon valley" is that there is very little hapening that is technically interesting.

For example, take interest groups. User groups for various topics of technical interest certainly do exist - for some value of "exist". They are unfortunately not very effective. Some common patterns I've seen are

FizzBust - There is a lot of enthusiasm for setting up a group, drawing up an agenda and holding an initial meeting. After that first (or occasionally second) meeting, nothing much happens and the group dies away.

"Eternal Beginners Syndrome" - Every single user group meeting has talks of the variety "Introduction to X" where X is the topic of interest. This is certainly fine *if* people ever move on to intermediate or advanced topics. This rarely happens. What's worse, every one of these "introductions" are (a)focussed on power point presentations and (b) every slide in those horrendous presentations are cut n pasted from the same old books. Encouraging powerpoint for non visual data is the infallible identifying sign of a group that has passed its peak and is now declining in utility and relevance.

A closely related pattern is "Propaganda over Exploration" - the group takes on the attributes of a cult with some members claiming to have "superior wisdom", the dissemination of which becomes the primary aim of the group. Thus rather than have a a collegial group exploring and learning and where appropriate criticizing the focus of the group, one has "masters" and "followers". This quickly drives away any good folks.

"Philosophy Over Code" - This is where people wax lyrical over the virtues of GPL vs the BSD license but haven't written a single piece of open source code in their lives and don't intend to.

"Uncritical Acceptance" - Once in a X user group I suggested that one possible topic for an upcoming "X Conference" would be "Where is the use of X inappropriate". I was quickly shushed with "That is a valid question but asking it in public would "hurt the movement" ". My reaction was "Duh? "movement"? what movement?" but I didn't press further.

The way to run an effective (vs "popular") user group would seem to actively invert all these phenomena. Have a small bunch of experts meet regularly to discuss things of interest. Don't actively try to expand the group or conduct "outreach". Avoid all formal organization and "outreach programs". If someone wanders in after hearing some word of mouth description of what goes on that's fine, but don't actively aim at recruiting or expanding the group. Have everyone bring code (or proofs or papers or whatever the metric of actual progress in the field is) and actively discourage empty philosophizing.

I've been experimenting with some of the above ideas for the last few months and they see to work well. One kind of "community" I'd like to see is of amateur researchers in hard comp sci - amateur in the sense of "pursuing research strictly out of interest and not to get paid" , not "amateur" as in "lacking skill". Assembling a group like this has its own difficulties however. With a few honorable exceptions most members of (Indian) "research groups" of technical companies could be stood up against the nearest wall and shot with no appreciable impact on the output of those groups. Likewise for most researchers in (Indian) government service or the (Indian)educational institutions. But "most" != "all" and that is what keeps me from abandoning the idea.