User Forums - is online really better than face to face ?
I spent the whole of yesterday, with the UK based MVP community who were at campus in Reading, and I was keen to know their views on how they feel about how Microsoft interacts with the IT Pro's, and to capture some of their thoughts. Most of the MVP's I spoke to seemed to be happy with their involvement through newsgroups and other online user forums, but none of them interacted with their contacts in a face to face user group or forum environment. So this got me thinking. Are user groups happy to interact with each other primarily through the newsgroups, or do they feel that there is benefit from regular face to face meetings? I had a quick search on the web for some UK centric User Groups or Forums in the messaging or management technologies areas and found very few IT specific user groups for platform people (as opposed to developers who seem to have lots).
Why is this? Don't the IT Pro's have the same sort of challenges as developers? Don't we need to have user groups in the UK? Or are we happier in front of our PC's with blogs and newsgroups? Is this a UK specific issue, or is it just down to the good old UK weather?...