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Difficulty of getting people involved

It can be challenging to get people involved even if they have interest, skills, and time. Why is that? Our personalities can't be that objectionable, can they ;)? Sometimes the problem boils down to a lack of communication.

As one simple effort to find like-minded people locally, I posted a message like this to the craigslist "activities" page and similarly to the "strictly platonic" page:

I'm a programmer, amateur mathematician, ex-student, and free-lance philosopher. I am looking for other folks with similar interests to get together for hack fests, math seminars, philosophical discussions, and/or culture jamming. Cf. http://planetx.cc.vt.edu/AsteroidMeta/HomePage

Perhaps other folks would like to try similar postings in other locales (e.g. NYC, Atlanta). If this is going to be a "free math movement", it should be a popular movement!

In addition to this sort of shot-in-the-dark (pull) approach, one should presumably try some shot-in-the-light (push) approaches, e.g. canvassing local GNU/Linux user groups, or, like Ray is doing, LISP user groups, etc., insofar as they exist.

One difficulty is (of course) figuring out which are the relevant groups to canvass. --jcorneli