Running a CS Club

Did you participate in a Computer Science club during school? Or have you ever been involved in large, successful meetups in your area? What is the best way to attract interest to a CS club lainons?

Our uni has a CS society and a computing club. The CS society is a drinking club for people studying CS, while the computing club used to run CS-related activities (Raspberry Pi workshops, Unity workshops, etc.) and field trips but now all the driven members have graduated so we just sit in the Linux lab and do our assignments. 4-8 people show up each meeting. Last year it took a semester and a half to decide on a club project, and we didn't follow it up in the remaining half semester.

>>2607 >large, successful meetups in your area? What do you expect when you say that? In Cambridge, which some people call the UK's Silicon Valley, it's rare to see more than 30 people on a single evening with 10-20 being typical. Although sometimes the limiting factor is how many people can physically fit inside a meeting room or corner of a cafe/bar. London might be better, I don't know. >What is the best way to attract interest to a CS club lainons? From my experience simple talks or lectures attract more people than interactive things like study groups, workshops or roundtables. People who attend other meetups just to wage slave for something they are organizing tend to be more successful too. It obviously helps if you already have a network of people you know and can ask to come.

>>2614 s/wage slave/ＳһᎥll/ Not sure why that word is censored. At least replace it with something that makes sense in a verb context.

i didn't participate in a cs club in college, but my brother does. there's only like 10 members and they mostly just find excuses to fuarrrk around with hardware that the school pays for. seems pretty fun honestly. if you're trying to make a cs club in your school, just do whatever all the other clubs do to recruit members. did you already look for existing clubs in your area?

>>2607 Any city I live in (which have been Santa Clara, San Diego, Seattle) have very large and thriving programming meetups that I attend when living in those cities. The San Francisco Javascript meetup has 12,000 members: https://www.meetup.com/jsmeetup/ The San Francisco Ruby meetup has 6000 members: https://www.meetup.com/sfruby/ Im currently not a member of either the above meetups even though Javascript and Ruby are my two main languages as I like smaller meetups in the South Bay and I dont want to have to bother taking CalTrain up to San Francisco.

My university had a few computer science related clubs. ACM were usually the biggest meetings but pretty dull. There's been clubs for tinkering with hardware and building stuff from scrap supplies, a Linux club, hacking club, and a programming contest club, along with several others. Most of them popped up, lasted a semester or two and then fell off as the seniors were usually the ones planning everything and when they left, the clubs fell apart. >What is the best way to attract interest to a CS club lainons? Do cool soykaf and provide free pizza and, if you can, free booze. Have non-CS based events often so that people can socialize and befriend newcomers. Assuming you're specifically talking about college clubs, getting a professor or two to offer incentive to their students to go is a good idea. If you're holding a lecture about security, talk to your school's security professors and see if they'll offer up a few bonus points for attendance, or at least endorse it in class. Absolutely do not let your clubs consist solely or mostly of just meetings. That's fuarrrking boring. Plan as much as you can over text/slack/whatever-is-popular-for-group-chat-at-your-university, discuss things on group chat that don't need to be discussed irl, and make sure that when you're meeting up irl that something fun is happening. Try to foster a welcoming environment for new people. Make sure that new people are given ample opportunity to talk and that everyone attempts to include them. It's annoying when someone goes to a club and just ends up watching everyone else talk.

I was part of my university's Unix Users Group. We mainly got together and talked about FOSS, ate pizza, worked on a few pet projects. We partnered up with our rival university's UUG and created a joint IRC network, for example. My uni's UUG eventually fizzled out shortly before I graduated, but the IRC network is still up and operational. Kinda eerie going in there, though. >What is the best way to attract interest to a CS club lainons? Get a small group of like-minded people together, start up a small website for your club as the initial step (helps if the site is interactive and encourages discussion), then start advertising around your uni with posters. Start putting together roundtables, tech talks, workshops, install parties, etc. We plastered QR codes around campus and the city at large that linked to our group's web presence. Things sort of snowballed from there. But, man, am I jealous. I'd give anything to be back in college. Truly are the best years of your life.