The Portuguese Architecture Councils
This year, as in 2006, I was lucky enough to help at the Architecture Booth at Teched Developers. During my shifts, I had the opportunity to talk with fellow MVPs Paulo Morgado and Joao Martins, the winner of the 2006 Iron Architect contest as well as . I learned that in Portugal, they have 6 Architecture User Groups in various cities, with 6-10 members each. And that in a country with only 10 million people. Larger countries may have trouble organizing even one architecture council, but Portugal has 6! How did they do this?
I think the secret is that each architecture council works in a very informal way. They hold monthly meetings where someone either presents an application or system's architecture, or asks for help on a particular problem. The meetings are held in typical meeting rooms, where people can sit around a table and discuss the architecture or the problem at hand. There is no speaker at a podium, speaking to a large, silent audience.
The various councils were also created in a rather informal way. The members of the first architecture council started meeting at Lisbon until some of them realized they came from neighbouring cities. Those members broke off and created their own local groups which grew until some of the members that came from the same city broke off and created their own council.
Contrast this with another country, where people are trying to create one architecture council with limited success. The problem is that organizing the council meetings isn't easy. If you are going to invite many architects, you must make it worth their while. You must find an appropriate speaker, and that is not easy. As a result, the architecture council meetings are rather infrequent and the council is still straggling to take off.
I think the results prove which approach is best. Congratulations to Paulo, Joao and all the members of the Grupo de Arquitectura de Software Português!