Apologies for the spam - i'm trying to kick off a new generalist user group here in Melbourne - it'll run like a monthly barcamp.
Here's the pitch - please join the group if you think you might be interested - the first meeting will probably be mid March: http://groups.google.com.au/group/mxug "My name is Mark and I use the Melbourne X User Group to be astounded by technical interests that I was previously unaware of" As a geek, i'm hopelessly addicted to novel intellectual stimulation. I have a very short attention span so frequently while learning about something new notice something else shiny and start looking in to that. Maybe 80% of the books I start get dropped at the 20% mark (although I still consider them 'in progress' years later). This is referred to as NADD by rands, Hal Fulton called it polymania and it is (I have to make myself believe) a fairly typical geek characteristic. So the intention of this Melbourne X User Group is to feed this learning disorder. Each meeting will be a sip of the firehose of technical obsessions that people have been cultivating. Meetings will be monthly and go from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. They'll be hosted at the ThoughtWorks office in Melbourne. The only rules will be that presentations can only ever go for 15 minutes and there'll only be one stream. That means about 6 slots (30 minutes to eat something and chat in the middle). Recovery will follow with the consumption of alcohol at Horse Bazaar. Talks could all start with - 'My name is W and I use X because Y'. Maybe that's a bit wanky but I think it's important that you say why you think something is worth considering and makes the presentation very focused (a sales pitch effectively). eg. My name is Mark and I use clojure because software transactional memory is the only way to write concurrent code that my mind can cope with. My name is Karen and I use gobby because real time collaborative text editing is awesome. My name is Rory and I use google app engine because I have no interest in managing my own infrastructure for any simple CRUD application. My name is Christine and I use gelati because it's been 40 degrees in Melbourne for nearly a week now and gelati's sweet and cool My name is Phil and I use spoons because knives and forks cut my mouth. I thought maybe the first slot could be reserved for 20 second talks about really cool stuff that just doesn't need further elaboration (like the melbourne ruby group's analog blog). People should submit their ideas for talks in advance and they'd just go into a queue. If there's a huge backlog of choices, maybe voting might be an option but I think would most likely discourage people from further participation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support procedure: https://www.codify.com/lists/support List address: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists
