Good example of geek get-togethers that tend to end well: game jams, such as the Global Game Jam.

There's focus (games! making games! a theme!), so participants just need to bring some skills (coding/art/music) and the willingness to awkwardly make impromptu teams with complete strangers. It's unlikely that the community will get swayed too far in one direction or another (all games need programming, and it's nice to have good art). "Idea men" have to find some sort of talent they can use for their team, otherwise they'll just be ignored or, at best, used as a playtester or level/content designer.

Negatives are that you have to clear out an entire weekend, and find a place with power and wifi that will let you stay (and potentially sleep) there.

I guess I've never heard of game jams, but am now intrigued... It seems though that unless you've developed games before it might be hard to accomplish anything, even with a team? Or no?

Code jams (game or otherwise) are great.

When I was in Pittsburgh, I help start up the Pittsburgh Coding Dojo [1]. Each meeting was split into two parts. During the first part, we broke out into groups to solve a previously selected "code kata." The second half was a show-and-tell in which everyone got to explain their solution.

Sometimes we switched it up and instead of breaking out into groups, we used a single computer with a projector and coded the kata round-robin with everyone looking on.

It was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed that group.

[1] http://www.pghcodingdojo.org/index.php/Main_Page

The Honolulu FU meeting was kind of sad. Four guys, including me, and half of them wanted to show off code they'd written for their employer. The "code for code's sake" attitude seems to be pretty rare.

Maybe those guys are like me and while they love to code for code's sake, their full time coding jobs and lives outside of work and the need for sleep are keeping them from coding outside of work.

Trust me I keep trying to find a way to do it, but when you can only code for either an hour or two or large chunks but only on the weekend, you just can't get into flow.

I keep hearing about people that can do it, and they allegedly also have friends, and fun away from the keyboard, and they supposedly are also not sleep deprived. Let's just call me an atheist about people like that.

I'm actually moving away from what you describe - a little less than a year ago, I had just finished school, my wife had a baby, and I started a demanding coding job at a startup. For about 6 months, I couldn't code outside of work for my life - I'd doze off to news.yc, RSS feed, even reddit at times.

In those 6 months, though, two ideas have been snowballing - (1) that (Greasemonkey) + (code repository with dependency resolution) + (some other stuff) would be a revolutionary piece of software, and (2) that the great thing about Lisp is vaguely similar to "Dependency Injection" and "Inversion of Control" - macros (reader and otherwise) are dependencies which are injected into the reader and compiler. If I was to figure out an elegant way of doing this in JS, I can piggyback on the buzz of DI and IoC to help people think deeper about programming.

Couple that with the frustration of "people don't get it unless you show them code", and I've been spending more and more nights coding away again. So my recommendation would be:

1) Get excited about something

2) Realize that you're very fortunate to have the resources to be excited about something 99% of the world does not

3) Socially commit by telling people about it (even if they don't get it)

Thanks for the advice.

Yep just like all of the .net user groups around here.

Could it be use of the word "union" as well - libertarians (of a fashion) seem to be common place in these circles, the word would grate for many I would have though.

I'm from Detroit and I've seen the way union thugs intimidate and essentially coerce people not to cross the picket line. While there is a hint of nostalgia for the early labor movement still present in the word, these days the word Union is synonymous with backward, seniority-oriented, immigrant-hating, dying industry working thugs.

I think it sucks that something like this doesn't work. I'd love to be apart of it, but even the groups I've been apart of are only good for a little while before they start to fizzle out. It's a shame actually.

I was part of it from the beginning and really wanted it to go somewhere. The rules were a little stringent, but I thought it'd be good for people.

Too bad this didn't work out.

The FU seemed somewhat elitist when it started. Maybe that detracted from the potential members?

from reading zed's two articles about it, it seemed way too organized. something like this has to just evolve out of a few people meeting up, telling their friends, meeting again with a slightly larger group, and so on.

otherwise you have all this meta-discussion about what the group's logo should be (why the hell does it need a logo?) and how meetings should run and what color the bikeshed should be, when all people want to do is get together, meet new people, and hack on stuff. why would anyone want to attend a meeting where you are forced to give a presentation in front of strangers? where's the fun in that?

in the openbsd group, when some people want to create something new or hack on something complex, we don't create a wiki and an irc channel and take minutes on the meetings. we organize a "hackathon", invite the relevant people there, and sit in a room together and hack. when we get tired, we go out for beers and talk, then go back to hacking.

This is a good point. Also, you can avoid the large public crash-and-burn that happened here. Growing up from a few people lets you test out ideas without failing catastrophically.

The bitch of it is that he's right so often. It's like John McEnroe on the tennis court.

I met Zed at RubyFringe and I was shocked at how nice he was. Maybe he has a whole Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde thing, but I honestly think he just gets out his anger in his writing.

Dude, have you met the man? Or are you regurgitating fables told to you at bedtime?

Seriously, calm the hell down.

My childhood wasn't particularly horrible, but I've got to say that I'm jealous if there are people out there who actually got to experience bedtime fables about Zed Shaw. That would be awesome.

No.

It would be so fucking awesome.

Get it right.