Several students in my campus ACM chapter realized this and worked to make our meetings fill in some of the gaps. We had weekly meetings and covered things that attendees could get started using immediately. Code-alongs were encouraged. Popular topics had followup meetings. I don't even know how much time we spent playing with POV-Ray.

The lightning talks meeting was also really popular; one guy showed how to use Blender in five minutes, someone else talked about a darknet he had written, and another student used it to distribute Google Wave invites she had from her summer internship.