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by Kasper Weibel.
Original Post: The Chp Rails meetup
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Last night I went to the first Ruby on Rails meetup in Copenhagen. It was arranged by Jesper and friends. His employer had very generously donated the beverages.
The meeting was a really good experience and I have the feeling that the Rails crowd in Denmark are a bunch of spirited individuals with clear views on web development.
Having attended the similar meetings in London I just want to share my views on the very different organization of the two meetups. I think it might say a bit about English and Danish networking culture.
The Copenhagen meetup took place at a bar in central Copenhagen. People were pretty much on time, and we found our seats in an orderly fashion, not talking too loudly (after fetching one of the free beers of course). After a while the meeting was opened by everybody taking a minute to present themselves, thus getting the full attention of the others. It turned out we were a mixed crowd of professionals, consultants and students and that everybody would run away from .NET and Java, was it not for the good money. After the presentation there was a short discussion about future Cph meetups, and although no date was set both a draft agenda and a late August date was decided upon. Then it was decided to make a mailing list. Ollie (check his first hand account of the meetup) offered the use of Skåne/Sjælland Ruby User Groups wiki as a starting point. Personally I feel that the Rails meetups in Cph need its own place on the web. After that there was general mingling.
The London meetup took place in a larger pub in central London and vas a very different beast altogether. The music was loudish and the beers were plenty. What happened there is best described as a chaotic mix of demoing applications, technical discussions, exchanging of business cards, discussing business models and so forth. The bottom line is that there was no organization whatsoever except for the time and venue. I found it inspiring because it was really every man for himself, everyone trying to draw attention to whatever they were interested in. It was really Speakers Corner on Rails :-) Also I had some good discussions there about how to deal with the problems of outsourcing to China (it's cheap - and difficult).
My impression of the Cph meetup compared to the London one is that it was a very orderly affair indeed. This doesen't come as a suprise to me. People in Denmark are generally very organized and anarchy is discouraged. But I find it contradictory to create interpersonal networks in orderly settings. I regard networks between people as fundamentally arbitrary and there's no idea in organizing their creation. I actually like the idea of just telling the time and venue and then see what happens.
Then again it was a really good meeting and I think that everybody felt it was nice to hear a bit about the others. In Denmark people generally have a lot of respect for the person, and not only for his product.
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