Leader no more
Well, that’s that – I’m no longer the leader of Van.pm, the Vancouver perl users group.
A few years back, I was interested in hooking up with some local Perl people for networking and learning opportunties. I had attended one meeting of Van.pm before its then-leader moved to Seattle, and there hadn’t been a meeting since. I found the mailing list and asked about a meetup. The answer was something along the lines of “there hasn’t been a meeting in years because no one has organized one; if you want one, plan one”. It sounded like a fun thing to get involved with, so I went for it.
Fast forward to now. I think there’s been a grand total of 2 or 3 technical meetings, and 1 or 2 social meetings. I’ve been thinking about why this is the case. At first, I believed it was because I had trouble getting ahold of speakers, which is true – I had sent solicitations out to the list without response, and I just didn’t really know many people in the community at large. Over time, I began to realize that I just wasn’t that passionate about Perl. This is why I didn’t schedule more meetings – I didn’t want a meeting without scheduled speakers, where people just sat around and talked about Perl.
Don’t get me wrong – Perl is still my language of choice, the language I work most with professionally, and the language I’ve worked with the longest. If I had to choose a new language for a project, I would likely choose Perl. That said, I just don’t find myself getting excited about it. I don’t contribute to CPAN, I haven’t tried out Perl 6, and I don’t go on the Perl IRC channels. If there is an interesting advancement in Perl 6, or a particularly nice module on CPAN, I’ll have a look and read about it, but I’ll almost never test it out. I like consuming content about Perl, but not necessarily talking about it.
So, over the Christmas break, my friend Scott suggested that he take over leadership. Scott is pretty much the opposite of myself when it comes to Perl – he’s got a few modules going, he’s always on one Perl IRC channel or another, he’s contributed tests to Perl 6, and he’s always one to try out new perlish things. Based on this, I thought it would be a great idea that Scott take over. He’s already put forward to have more regular meetings, scheduled speakers or not, and I believe this will cause more people to come out. He’s a much better fit for the role than I am.
Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. Good luck, Scott 
