As you are probably aware the UK PowerShell group has been very quiet over the last few months. This has been due to my personal circumstances – hopefully now resolved.
I want to re-start the group and was wondering what people wanted.
When I started the group 6 years ago we were the only PowerShell user group in the world! Things have changed. Back then I could easily organise physical meetings where the personal contact and ability to talk to people who were also learning PowerShell was invaluable. Its not possible to get the venues these days so I switched to using Live Meeting. Not as satisfying but much easier from a logistics stand point. There are problems with sound quality over Live Meeting. I’ve tried it on a number of networks from a number of machines and the sound is poor at best and impossible to listen to at worst.
The big problem for any user group is finding speakers. There aren’t that many people willing to speak on any particular topic and many of them aren’t based in the UK.
At the moment I’m thinking of a web cast every other month. I can’t do every month – I just don’t have the time. If I can find other speakers to fill the gaps that will be great but I’m working on worst case. Six sessions a year I can manage.
This supposes that I can resolve the sound problems. I’m experimenting with Lync and hope that will solve the problem. if it doesn’t then a total rethink is required.
So the question to the PowerShell community – what do you want?
Richard Siddaway's Blog 
Richard,
Firstly, thanks for all the effort you put into organising these events. I know I find them very useful both in terms of attending and presenting.
Moving over to Lync seems like a good idea for the virtual events if the audio quality is better. I know some previous events have caused some frustration all round when let down by the quality of LiveMeeting.
I would like to see maybe some effort to resurrect some physical meetups, even say one or two a year in combination with the virtual meetings. I know there have been (and probably still are) difficulties in terms of venues, speakers etc, but I think it may be possible to overcome these.
Having attended some similar type events recently, including some for topics less mature than PowerShell, and been surprised by the number of attendees I think there’s a possibility they could work. There are some useful tools out there now (which perhaps were not available 2 or 3 years ago when you ran physical meetups) that can be used to help organise and promote such events.
Have a look at http://www.meetup.com/ and search say for similar kinds of topics to PowerShell around the London area and you will see quite a lot of regular and well attended meetups. Having attended some of these recently it has subsequently suggested (via email followups) other similar types of events to me and I’m sure that’s partly why these events appear to be thriving.
Looking forward to hearing what others think.
Jonathan