Yakoob on 24/10/2007 at 22:40

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True, but the first half probably wouldn't like it too much... also, I dislike clubs. And, as said, it has little to do with the actual goal behind our club, and I don't want to do stuff just for the sake of popularity.

Turtle on 24/10/2007 at 23:19

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Sounds like she needs a private 'meeting'.
You bring the Courvoisier, she brings the CAT-6.

*Bow-chicka-wocka-wocka*

Scots Taffer on 25/10/2007 at 00:23

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I ran a mathematical society at University, so I have something of an idea of what you're talking about, there ain't no one more awkward than a bunch of nerdy maths students whose social interaction amounts to dicussing the vagueries of ring theory with professors. The former society was dead and buried when we hit our third year of our undergrad and given that it was the last two years of uni for all those who were doing their BSc/MSc in maths, we decided to revive it for all and sundry. It was a lot of work and I think you're confusing membership with leadership in a lot of cases. I'll give you a few tips on how we ran it and then on what we did as a society.

Administration/Ownership: Decide up front who is dedicated to the society/club and wants to be a formal organiser and responsible for certain elements. I was the VP, the real power behind the President (who was chosen for political reasons, as he was the brainiest kid in the class who was a perfect example of a math geek who my wife and I had worked at breaking out of the mold), my wife was the treasurer, another person was an events co-ordinator. We sat down once a month and planned out the coming events. Your general membership should not be involved in this and honestly that's going to provide a whole lot of awkwardness, no one wants to step up to the plate in a general forum and dictate how anything should be done. Essentially invite people to form a small group/committee who decides what should be done and how the club should function.

Membership: Initial cost to join? Yes, definitely. We had a flat fee that once you paid got you entry to the various "free" events that the society held, this included the guest lectures (see Events below), certain social evenings and so on. A nice thing to do is fork out for cards, we had nice little business cards drawn up for our society and it just increases the sense of formal membership to what is essentially a social group. The initial fee also gives you a cashpool from which to throw certain events.

Events: Now much like your CompSci club we had actual legitimate maths events that had to be done; as part of the University funding we received it was necessary for us to be seen as still furthering maths as well as being a social group, you have a similar thing with say your Photoshop workshops (I don't know if you have funding opportunities), but you could also have guest lecturers on weird elements of CS, that's what we had - very odd mathematical lectures on astrophysics and biology and so on, for the actual die-hard math people who join up.
But really, this isn't why the society was started up and that's not why people will join up... the real prospect of joining university societies or clubs is to get rat-faced pissed on several occassions.
We held cheese and wine nights, which were de rigeur in our University, and to make a statement, we threw a fucking HUGE one the launch night of the society. In fact, people were carried out of our cheese and wine absolutely shit-faced. For a mathematical society, word travelled fast that we meant business, pretty soon we got offers from other affiliated societies like Physoc (Physics Society) and CompSoc (CS Society) and started throwing multiway bashes that were pretty successful. Given that we were in Scotland, we threw a multi-society (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9ilidh) ceilidh that was massive. You could have what the CompSoc had on several occasions, Beer and Pizza nights - a classic invertion of the stuffy Cheese and Wine night.
So that's two points mixed in there, getting shit-faced and thinking about hooking up with similarly minded groups/clubs is also a good idea, it allows you to pool resources and hence throw larger social events by pooling the cash from (say) tickets for the event across all three societies. You need responsible and trustworthy people though, it must be said: you don't want hundreds of dollars/pounds changing hands between people who you wouldn't leave your laptop with for five seconds.
Pub quizzes were another huge success, although I think a lack of Pubs might hinder you guys in the States. Maybe something else similar? Pub crawls are also successful, but bear in mind, a lot of prep work and forethought should go into these events otherwise they'll come off really stale or haphazard, then the inevitable fragmentation effect occurs and you lose half your number after the first watering hole. Just a word of warning.

So, to summarise: you need to do something that firstly loosens everyone up, given that you've already had a few meetings that have established something of an awkward atmosphere, you'll have to think doubly hard about what this is. I think some sort of pub-crawl or cheese and wine night sounds in order, something to lubricate the situation, allow people to relax a little, away from the hardcore nerdery of gathering around a monitor laughing at youtube clips. Once you establish something along the lines of camraderie or easy social interaction after one big event, start doing little mini-events, a small workshop on Photoshop, a guest lecture on CS use in something odd, and so on. Space your big events out with little mini events, but make the big events memorable and worthwhile, this creates positive word of mouth buzz and allows you to grow your membership.
After our first cheese and wine night, our membership doubled and continued to grow after every event we held thereafter. We did become insanely successful though, because we even invited a former student back to the University to do a career fair for her company (Procter and Gamble) and she was so impressed with how we ran it that she gave us corporate sponsorship, that continued for at least a year or two after we left and the subsequent leaders picked up the mantle. Oh! And that's another good one, organise career fairs outside of the University doing it by trying to contact former alumni to give talks about practical work using the degree subject.

Anyway, hope that helps. A bit of professionalism and effort go a long way into making what could be just a small gathering of nerds into a thriving social club that really does a lot for the University, the academic department and a bunch of lonely people that would otherwise go to classes and then go home and read textbooks.

Edit: After reading all the replies in this thread, Yakoob, I think it's appropriate to state here that your like or dislike of pubcrawls etc means precisely butt-fuck all to the success and popularity of the social group. People join clubs/societies at uni to get PISSED, and have fun and learn in some cases, but mostly people like to get pissed. Give the masses what they want. Our President was a tee-totaller, that didn't stop him from helping to organise one of the biggest drunkfests ever legitimately held inside an academic department.

demagogue on 25/10/2007 at 01:09

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If this thread is just turning into tips and tricks for club organizers, I'll throw in my two cents.

I ran a Japanese Language Table at law school (the idea was that the Japanese foreign exchange students and American students had a time to get together each week and mutually practice their foreign language skills with each other). So I put together themes for each week, like some topic to talk about, sometimes even with vocab-lists, etc. But -- the punchline of this whole thread, probably -- it was at its best when it doubled as a social networking support.

One of the first things we did was to making some meetings at buffet-style restaurants, so it was more of a lunch-outing, and organized bigger stuff for the weekends ... picnics, nice restaurants, parties, touring the city ... anything to drum up more people coming to that stuff, which added to the number of people coming to the proper language tables. And any time anything sort of related happened on campus, like some visiting professor or group from Japan or something, we took it upon ourselves to be the representatives of the school to have some part in it.

As for the activities, like other said, it's better when it's active stuff that everyone can participate in, like (for us) you find some interesting article that small groups can translate together (an early, bad idea was the objectives for JIS's Thief FMs, before I knew one objective was to get a blowjob from a bugbeast, haha ... I won't be forgetting that Chinese character) ... they have to talk together to do something, it's sort of fun, something you'd want to read or talk about anyway (if you pick the right article), and at the end of the meeting, there's some accomplishment. Also, I found it so important to get everyone doing something; in a discussion, you want to be going in a circle so everyone talks who wants to.

My general way of thinking is, people want to feel they're doing something trendy and cool ... no matter how nerdy the subject matter, you can spin it so they feel part of something happening when they come, which really is as much about spin as substance ... going to lunches and parties together, doing active stuff, all good spin. Feeling neglected or just-talked-at is bad spin. I don't feel like I'm really adding anything that hasn't already been said, but I'm just saying it was my experience, too.

37637598 on 25/10/2007 at 02:24

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Ok. First off, you need to change the name of your club to 'Bitches, Whores, and Big Breasted Sluts'

Secondly you need to have something of common interest to everyone. You could pay them, you could hire a stripper, you could do alot of things if you had money flying out of your ass, but you need to figure out what the 'right' thing to do is. Promise them something in return for their contributions. The idea to create something is a good one, but as you've confirmed not everyone will be interested in the same thing. Perhaps you can get them all together and discuss what they want to get out of the club, or what they would change about it. Another suggestion is to give them all a common goal that they can compete to complete. I'm at a hotel and am being waited on at the computer so, i'm gonna go. but put yourself in their shoes, think about them all. Then try to fix it, good luck! peace.