Back in the day, LUGs (Linux User Groups) were a big thing and an important part of helping the nascent OS spread.

I was part of organizing my local group and was active for years. There is an ongoing debate in such groups that ask the question: "Why are we here...what is our purpose? Is it a place to help newbies learn the tech? Or is it a place to for experts to network and share?"

Its very hard balance to find, and counter-intuitively it doesn't really work long-term to do both: A newbie that wonders into the meeting is going to be completely overwhelmed by a presentation of an expert explaining how he replaced gnulibc with uclibc and recompiled his whole system bringing the installed footprint down by 65%. Similarly that same expert is going to be bored and stop showing up to handhold yet-another-newbie install Debian on their laptop.

There is no practical way to compose meetings to satisfy both groups.

In the end, we decided to be an "experts focused" group. All of us in the group were IT professionals in the area and the rationale is we were doing more to help Linux by helping each other solve expert problems that could result in being able to push Linux into our respective IT environments.....moreso than helping a random grandpa install linux on his computer....something that he might not of even really wanted to do (you'd be amazed at how many newbies would come to a few meetings then suddenly decide they weren't that into it and never show up again).