“You are not going to pull out of it, [a user group] is there for life,” Daniel Strassberg, Quest
‘What we have found is that people like people- they like to get together every now and then and have a face-to-face chat and a beer and a good old chin wag about what’s happening.’ Paul Harapin, VMware
A social revolution is taking place right before our very eyes. On the Internet like-minded people are meeting every second, starting new relationships and creating a new sense of community never seen before. MySpace, Linked In—even msn messenger—are all changing the way we communicate and are becoming the first port of call for people wanting to meet new and like-minded others.
In the IT world the same thing is happening. IT communities covering a range of technologies, from messaging and collaboration projects (such as Zimbra) through to customer relationship management (CRM) providers (such as SugarCRM’s open-source offerings), are sparking a revolution in the world of the technology worker. For them online interaction in these communities is an invaluable working tool—members can share information on important issues, developments and deployments. Vendors also benefit as the community helps spark the popularity and use of the products.
These communities cover everything from the features users may want to see on new developments of the software to classified advertisements for developers and integrators as well as general help tips. But all of this is following a trend already proven popular in the IT industry, that of the IT user group.
According to Brian Prentice, analyst at research firm Gartner, open-source communities are changing the very nature of what a user group is, harnessing technologies and methods of communication that were not available 15 years ago, when some of the technologies with well-established user groups were already in wide-spread operation.
“The open source groups are as much an extension of collaboration as MySpace is—it is all about how people with a like interest in developing core technologies get together, share ideas, and share the same code. If you think about it is incredible. Back 15 years ago you could not even burn a CD,” Prentice says.
Prentice says what happens with these structures of communication in future will be for time to tell as more and more ways to interact are explored, pushing us further away from the formally structured user group model known today. This in no way means the “old world” way of looking at a user group is dead. Quite the opposite really. In many ways user groups are still worth exploring for the known benefits they can bring, harnessing on the human desire to actually meet in person and take opportunity to learn with more vibrant, off-the-cuff communication methods.
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