Somewhat related to the other thread I just started.  In order to get
some grassroots support for Ruby, I've offered to host a couple
tutorial meetings regarding how to use Ruby.

The backgrounds of the people who would attend are somewhat varied,
but are currently polarized between older people (45+) who are
strongest with Ada and C (and some know Perl), and newer people (me
included) in their 20s who probably know more Java-ish, C++, maybe
Python.

My goals for the meetings is to 1)  Show them the language 2)  Get
them productive in it 3)  Show them why we should use it.

Any ideas on how to do it?

It would be great to build up a fairly complex, well-tested,
distributed application of some sort, I think.