All,
Every place I have worked, I have tried to institute technical exchanges over lunch. The idea is that one or two days a week, people interested in participating bring in their lunch while a volunteer teaches about their area of expertise. In theory, this seems like a good idea but in practice it never seems to go anywhere.

Recently, I have been asked to help out in producing sanitized test data. It turned out to be a perfect opportunity to show of Perl's strengths (parsing and manipulating data). In fact, it has been so successful that the team lead of the Java developers has said that, if I was still willing to teach perl over lunch, he would make it mandatory for his team.

So what are your thoughts and philosophies on making this great opportunity successful? While advice over which topics to cover are appreciated, I am more interested in how to deal with the human element. Any thoughts you might have are greatly appreciated.

Update: The team lead has just indicated that participation will not be mandatory and that free lunch will be incentive only. The meditation still applies regarding the best way to interact with the folks that do show up.

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