Sydney PHP Group

Hi

I'm one of the organisers of the Sydney (Australia) PHP Group. We currently 
have upwards of 30 members appearing at our monthly meetings, with innumerable 
lurkers on the forums (estimated at 900 excluding our friends the spammers). 
You can find us at http://sydphp.org
There are currently 5 organisers of the group, so we can cover meetings when 
one or more of us is unavailable for a meeting.

Like many groups, we started out on Meetup, although it took us about 6 months 
to get a meeting together as it kept on auto-cancelling our meetings when we 
had < 5 RSVPs! I think we were the first to get a subdomain on ug.php.net 
(sydney) although that has fallen by the wayside as we don't control where it 
is pointed. We've finally settled in at sydphp.org. It'd be nice to get that 
sydney.ug.php.net domain pointed back at us..

We currently meet at CodeGear offices on the first Thursday of each month with 
the exceptions of December (party) and January (Summer holidays). Meetings are 
free and CodeGear provide pizza and drink.

Site-wise, we have a dead forum and are planning to scrap that and set up an 
announce and jobs mailing list, as we've found that duplicating what other PHP 
resource sites are trying to do is not going to work.  We're also aiming to 
get sydphp-planet up and running to allow members & php users across Sydney  a 
place to have a centralised community repo of local PHP data.
We have quite a bit of interest in our jobs forum 
(http://forum.sydphp.org/index.php?a=forum&f=19), with about 1 position / week 
on average getting posted there.

Like other groups I've read about here, we struggle to get some well known 
presenters. I think this is due to the distance to Sydney from Europe and 
North America, another thing I've noticed is that we struggle to convince some 
of the higher profile PHP-using organisations in Sydney to appear.
Another item we struggle on is getting meeting attendees to contribute, Q&A 
style, at the actual meetings. Is it something about highly technical people 
in a small room ?  Any advice on these is welcome.

For the future, we're aiming to provide more of a community for Sydney PHP 
users and we've also been chatting informally about a PHP conference in 
Sydney.


Thanks
James