Tech Community User Groups
When working in the tech community you can often find yourself working in a silo. While immersing yourself in your discipline is necessary for domain knowledge, to truly work toward explicit expertise, your best bet is talking to others within the same discipline who can help illustrate what you don’t know you don’t know.
User Groups are where developers or designers meet to discuss common interests within specific disciplines; taking advantage of the benefits of peer learning while also maintaining valuable network relationships.
Sites like Stack Overflow have come a long way toward bringing developers together to create an environment where productive dialog can help solve problems and overcome barriers in knowledge, but there is also a lot to be said for peer-to-peer interaction.
In 2002, Stanford reprinted an essay on the benefits of peer learning that explored the benefits of two-way, reciprocal learning. More locally, Waterloo Region takes advantage of collaborative learning by hosting user groups. User Groups are where developers or designers meet to discuss common interests within specific disciplines; taking advantage of the benefits of peer learning while also maintaining valuable network relationships.
At this month’s most recent user group, hosted by GPUG PHP, Adam Wathan talked to a group of 30 people about rapid development using Laravel. This group, as with many user groups, has a formula for the night that encourages attendees to come and network before a brief presentation and discussion before more casual networking.
Presentations by members of user groups expand everyone’s knowledge and expose its members to new techniques and tools that they may not otherwise know about or have an opportunity to learn about.
User groups have a casual atmosphere that encourages feedback and engagement.
For many developers, there is a significant advantage to watching another developer move seamlessly through a live coding demonstration of their topic.
One simply has to watch the members nodding and engaging to see the benefit of introducing new things to developers in this format.
Originally published at transmission.vehikl.com on February 27, 2014.
