If you've attended a WinProTeam meeting in the last year or so you've probably been struck by how poorly the meetings are run.  Maybe it's how disorganized the leadership seems when trying to do even the simplest things like sending out email or updating the website.  Maybe it's meeting schedules constantly changing or getting canceled at the last minute.  Maybe it's all of that, but it's evident that something is not quite right.

For me, and I can really only speak for me, I've been questioning the purpose and usefulness of WPT in it's current form.  I've got a couple major concerns.  First, we've got a lot of baggage because these groups were born of Charles Carroll.  Second, I think we're serving two communities poorly -- one by diluting the space and the other by lack of focus.

I'd be suprised if you're in the ASP.NET space and haven't heard of Charles Carroll.  That's been both good and bad for the group.  In the initial days of ASPVienna and ASPRockville, the precursors to WPT, his popularity helped pull people to the meetings.  As the rift in the community got larger and more and more people got turned off by Charles, his attitude or treatment of speakers, his involvement and later just association started to hurt WPT.  I've had several speakers turn down opportunities to speak based on the possibility that Charles might show up.  Even during the last couple years when Charles has had absolutely no involvement in the group.

To my second point, I think we're hurting both communities we're trying to serve.  Vienna, VA is well served by Capital Area .NET.  Vienna is actually well represented by usergroups in the Windows space. We might have offered a different/unique view/time slot to Vienna had our meetings been consistently good, but they weren't.  I'd rather have those interested in supporting WPT Vienna move over to CAPArea and help them continue to grow than limp along with WPT.

As far as Rockville, MD is concerned, I think there is a desperate need for a solid .NET developer community.  We went from monthly meetings, to every other month, to sometimes less frequently than that.  Though attendance has dwindled some, it seems the core community in that area wants to support a usergroup, regardless of how bad they are.  So we're trying to fix that.  Well, Dean Fiala is trying to fix that, and I'm going to help with a few things behind the scenes.  I think with a fresh start and the energy infusion from Dean and Jason Fabritz that we've got a really good chance of making RockNUG (www coming soon, it's being professionally designed) wildly successful.  We'd love for you to help out and attend our inagural meeting in June.  Details to be announced shortly.