But you also go there to enjoy the company of fellow geeks, salivate over gear, and so on. 
(My other motivation is that the yearly membership fee is less than the monthly fee of any Swiss German (āSchwyzertĆ¼Ć¼tschā) course. :-D)
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From my point of view learning is not the main purpose of a user group but meeting people who have the same interest.
I see it the same. But either there are not too many people who share this opinion or āmeeting peopleā has moved to the online space. (Probably something in between these two extremes)
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This is more or less known as the loss of the āthird spacesā. You can search for it on a search engine and a lot of articles and opinion pieces, or even studies, will show up talking about it. Itās an important issue but it by no means has a single root source.
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Well, in any case, I missed the last meeting but I am looking forward to the next one! But it would help to know in advance. Or perhaps @betazoid could make pollā¦
We have a wiki page here: LibreGraphicsVienna ā Metalab Wiki and also a website https://libregraphicsvienna.at/
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I tried to find some scientific article about that topic but there seems to be not that many actually. Or I cannot find them because I donāt know the correct search terms (Iām at home in engineering sciences ) - or because the pandemic is not that long ago and studies take some time to get done and published.
However there were some opinions which states that it is actually a shift of third spaces towards online communities, i.e., social media.
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Thatās what Iām saying. People donāt know any more whatās real.
One articleās abstract (2013; https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/informit.944336060096770 - tbh, I only read the abstract) stated that cyberspace is viewed as real space.
I think that this is both a good and bad thing.
Iām not sure what to make out of this information though. Does it imply it makes more sense to start an online community rather than a physical user group?
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I know this theory and unfortunately I have a lot of personal experience with it.
The end of it will be that people wonāt be able to do anything outside cyberspace.
We need to find again a balance between online/virtual/cyberspace and the (physical) reality. I learned it the hard way.
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But this brings me back to the original question: what would be the incentive to go to a user group?
The answer was somehow āto meet peopleā but you can do that online as well (probably even better).
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For some, personal (IRL, offline) contact is needed. I cannot imagine my life without meeting others in person (and Iām quite the introvert): going to the office sometimes, but even while doing mundane things like buying groceries and riding public transport. I donāt engage much there, but I am surrounded by people. Isolation, as demonstrated during the lockdown, can cause mental health issues. I know of some, however, who thrived during the same period.
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You know, itās extremely nice of you to sponsor this group but for me there is no need to continue it like we did during the past two years. We could meet at a coffe shop as well. To me our IRL friendshipis important, but if you are not interested or have no time for that any more, I wonāt die either.
I had told you about my previous experiences with brining together local darktable users, so for me the result is no surprise. At least now we know a bit more about the reasons for these difficulties, more than two years ago. Also, I am not so young any more and I think I know what to expect in life. I am happy if we are three or four people at a meeting.
If we want to continue despite these problems, I will still be available.
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There is also this:
sponsoring sounds more serious than what it is in reality
Speaking for me personally, I think a group dedicated to photography in general and a focus to open source hardware/software would catch my interest. For me, it is less ālearning how to use a specific toolā but rather ālearning new tools and workflowsā. I believe that for learning a new software, 2h in one month are just not enough, and if you want to do it, there is a ton of resources online. But of course, you would need to know first why it would be a good idea to learn how to use a specific software. From the meetings I learned about a lot new tools, websites, topics, ā¦ and if I need to, I can increase my knowledge about them at home.
Iām willing to continue it, even if only one or two people show up. Nevertheless, Iām thinking about why there seems to be no interest - and thatās why I asked the question initially. Especially I would like to find out if we are the exception or in the average. 18 years ago I joined another user group, which since then has dissolved - but back in the days, we had always 5+ people attending - usually more than that.
Specifically, there could be a ton of reasons: the place, the time, no regular schedule, the topics, the people (i.e., us), to little / wrong advertisement, ā¦ It could even be the case that, because Iām not a regular member of the metalab (I only come to the lab for this meeting), the meeting is seen as some kind of outsider. I noticed that when other people asked if it is okay to stay and watch - it may not be clear that this is really an open meeting (even though it is announced as such in the calendarā¦). I really do not know.
We could indeed just meet somewhere else to test if the location is the problem 
For example, we meet earlier, say at 17:00 for dinner and then stay at the cafe/restaurant and talk, if necessary with laptops. More like a Stammtisch.
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Trying to start an analysis:
So, as far as the topics are concerned, I think the best ones so far were:
- Astro photography
- Social media for photographers and artits
- Web photo galleries
- Darktable
At all of these meetings we had at least 6 participants, as far as I can remember.
I think inkscape and vkdt were the worst topics, but Inkscape is good and important software and has lots of users. Yea, and sceen calibration was not so popular eitherā¦
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So it is the choice of topic after all?
Well, letās see how Krita is going then 
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I think the relevant question is what would make people choose this particular activity over other ways of spending their time (which could be staying at home, alone or with their family, or meeting friends, or going to another event to meet new people, etc).
I have to admit that while I like meeting new people with shared interests, learning about software is not that interesting for me. I already spend too much time at the computer fighting various kinds of software for most of the day, and as for photography, I have hit the point of diminishing returns when it comes to learning about software and prefer to spend more time on improving my composition and capture technique.
Just my 2 cents.
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What I would love to do and I thought about for a while is a āPlay it raw liveā in every meeting. Everyone brings some pictures and everyone gets some time to process them. Afterwards there is a presentation & discussion for each picture.
In that case you could improve your own workflow but also try out new software and ask others who have knowledge about that software.
Iām still not sure what the advantage is over the online format (a more in depth discussion?), but I would be interested what do you think!
But yeah - that goes into the direction of a photo-club rather than user group
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@Tamas_Papp @Clerian @nicokaiser @quovadit @pk5dark @Vente @reox
Tomorrow, April 23rd, from 1900 CET
we will have another session about display calibration.
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