How to start a club

Peter:

The primary issues for forming a robotics club are:

1) Finding a time and place to meet. Initially, it can be somebody's house/garage, but as it gets larger, some sort of meeting space is required. Sometimes, you can find a library/community center. Some facilities charge money and others are free. Some clubs I know (not robotic clubs, by the way) meet at local restaurants (e.g. Denny's, local Pizza palor, etc.) 2) Finding interested people. After you post a message here on comp.robotics.misc, you are sort of on your own trying to find people. There are many interested people in the high/middle school, but they have a hard time getting to meetings. You might want contact the FIRST, FLL (First Lego League), BotBall people to see there is any interest. 3) Building Robots. Lot's of people enjoy coming to meetings, but never get over the hurdle of actually building a robot. Some effort is required to get people out of "learn" mode and into "build" mode. One of our members came up with a series of challenges to get people started. The first challenge is to build a robot that can wonder around a table without falling off; subsequent challenges build on that theme.

It takes a bunch of time and patience to get a functioning robot club going. However, at some point a critical mass is attained and the members start to do simply amazing things.

Just for the record, I am a member of the Homebrew Robotics Club based in the San Jose/Silicon Valley area. While I can't identify exactly when we hit critical mass (2-4 years ago), we now consistantly get 40-50 people a meeting and some truly fun and interesting robots show up. Since we collect no dues, we have no active membership roster. Since we meet on Wednesday nights, we have poor attendence from the high/middle school crowd.

I hope this helps,

-Wayne

Why don't you mention where you're located and ask anyone in your area who's interested to contact you?

Then you can set up whatever suits your group.

DOC

I had done that allready in my message on this group dated February 4th

2005, but noone responded. It would seem with having Virginia Polytechnic Institute right up the road and University of Virginia just down the road in the opposite direction, someone would respond. I guess I'm in the Black Hole of the Robot world here in Southwest Virginia. :(

Anyway, thank's to both of you for responding.

Be well and God Bless, Peter

Peter,

How about a virtual club? :-) I have the same problem here in Southern NH/NW MA. You would think with MIT, Harvard, UNH and WPI interest would not be an issue, but it is. I consider this newsgroup a virtual club in a way. Collectively there is a lot of knowledge here.