Thanks to All Who Attended the Denver Tech Meetup

It’s a couple of days late, as I spent my blogging time on Friday trying to finish up the Writely post, but I wanted to be sure and say thank you to everyone who attended last Thursday’s Denver Tech Meetup. From the entries of folks who were there, it seems like we’re getting closer to our goal of building a vibrant and diverse Denver technical community. Actually, check that – building is the wrong word. It’s more bringing that community together, since it already exists even if it doesn’t know it yet. My hope is that at some point, the DTM is able to become a kind of meta-community – one that bridges the gulfs between the existing, specialized user groups, one that enables attendees to find new jobs, look for opportunities to partner with each other, learn something new and (obviously) kill a few beers 😉

Because we had over 25 people attending, I’m going to skip trying to list all the individual blogs of attendees. Instead, I’m going to wait for the next generation of the Denver Tech Meetup website which may be powered by a package that Alex has mentioned to me, EventPress. As I understand it, it’s basically WordPress with a few plugins included out of the box. If EventPress doesn’t work out, I’ll probably look around at some other community packages or (gulp) try and build it myself using Rails.

Things that I’d like to see in the site:

1. User maintained attendee list:
   A simple way for attendees to add their blogs and other contact information pre-or-post event. This would let us skip the needless formality of exchanging cards at these things (I usually forget to bring mine anyway).

2. OPML List for above:
   Be great if you could import – in one step – a list of all of the Denver Tech Meetup attendees. OPML seems like the obvious solution here.

3. E-mail (SMS?) Notification (opt-in, of course) for #1:
   Each time I’ve done the meetup, I usually get a follow up email from a bunch of folks asking to be added to the list for next time. Currently, said list is maintained by Evite, but that’s less than ideal. I’d prefer for it to work off of the same list provided by the OPML.

4. iCal Support:
   I know some – perhaps many – of the attendees won’t know what iCal is or how to use it, but basically it’s like a web calendar file that can be subscribed to in various PIM packages and layered on top of a calendar. I know I use them frequently as do a couple of the other folks there, and would love to see this in the next generation of the site.

5. Event Photos:
   This I’d probably just outsource to Flickr. Include one of their widgets that pulls everything tagged denvertechmeetup, for example.

That’s about all I had in mind to begin, and while I don’t know of a package that does all of that out of the box (please let me know if you do), I’m sure with the help of some of the smart folks that have offered to pitch in (thanks Alex and Mike), we’ll get something figured out.

One last note: a couple of people have thanked me for putting together the meetup, and that’s much appreciated. But the thanks are largely undeserved – all I do is simply pick a day and send an email or two. It’s really not a big deal, in terms of time or effort. Any thanks necessary belong to each of the folks that take the time out of the schedule to make it downtown. Like any community, it’s success or failure is directly attributable to the participants, not the guy picking the day. So again, thanks to all who made it, and hope to see more folks there next time.