PHPWomen Birds of a Feather

A cry for help in how to reach a specific target audience... do people still use forums? My wife has just discovered forums, and is enthralled by this new form of communication on the internet... and she's from a technical IT background (albeit not an internet background).
The session didn't really consider or answer many of the questions listed in the outline above... I'd have found it more interesting if it had. As a developer in the second half of the century, in an industry that seems to focus on youth and the belief that old fogies don't understand technology at all; I'm half-wondering if PHP needs a PHP-Silver-Coders group.

I thought this was a great session to get some ideas on how to increase the numbers and engage more with visitors. Targeting and marketing features correctly is key and this session kind if helped to steer some thought around these.

I'd never really heard of the PHPWomen's group before this discussion, and wasn't sure what to expect from it. But it was a discussion, not a talk. There was an attempt to draw people into conversation, but I'm not sure that it worked that well. Once people had started talking it seemed to snowball a bit, bit several members of the audience remained firmly silent throughout.

I think that the reason for this was that as the first posting pointed out, this was a cry for help. The group have reached that stage where they've got to a point and seem unable to go any further. Yet there is no clear destination of where they want to go.

Discussion focused around ideas of what they could do, more local meets, membership fees, etc, etc. But there is no clear target or reason for these. I personally would like to see this group succeed. The people involved have got their hearts in the right place, and that's the most important thing. But I think that they need to decide what the group is actually for. Not just a general idea, but a distinct statement of intent. Once they have decided upon this I think that they wouldn't need discussion groups as much given their own innate abilities, but will be able to progress and astound us all.

15 minutes for a discussion is NOT long enough. brought out some good points and it was nice to have a discussion rather than talks all day. It broke it up for me. Pastey makes some really good points.

While I feel i didn't get the promised PHPWoman introduction I was provided with enough pieces to make of the whole thing in the end so 'Mission accomplished' i guess.

It felt the discussion had some value at least so I don't like my time was wasted :)

I came along to this uncon set of talks mainly because I wanted to know more about PHP women.
The discussion was obviously useful for the group and it did give some idea about what you already do and how it's run and how to get involved.

Continuing the discussion about the site and the group...

I had heard about you before and had had a quick look at the website, but within my 10 second attention span (I'm a developer so it goes with the job ^^) it wasn't obvious what you do, how active PHP women is or an easy way to get involved or sign up for anything.

I think it would be useful to encourage people to be able to "half-signup" to the idea, lurk a bit and see what's going on and if it's really for them. A mailing list or frequent twitter updates is a good way to do this as I'm sure there are other people like me that see the PHP women site and then never get around to checking back on it!
The forum is a good idea but only really useful once people are already engaged with the group.

I would really like to see PHP women expand, I was surprised how few women there were at the conference, I really thought there would be more!
I will be in touch, I'd like to help even if it's just spreading the message :)

(Apologies for my essay)

I hadn't realised before attending that this was actually a discussion rather than a talk, but I'm glad it was as what PHPWomen really need is more engagement. It was really good to get people thinking and contributing ideas about how the group could move forward. The challenge now is to see how this actually translates into reality.

Thanks for a great discussion. I'm curious how things will work out in the near future and how the board will pick up on these ideas.

Um. Not sure about this one. Discussions can be good & helpful, but the audience didn't have enough thinking time to come up with anything that sounded purposeful or practical. Useful as an introduction to phpwomen.