We've had a ton of excitement in the local PHP and other tech group meetings. Last week's Drupal meetings were well received, and spreading the intro/advanced topics across the TCWebDev and TCPHP groups opened some new doors. The local BSD group has had some exciting activity, with two internationally-known speakers already this year! Ethan Galstad brought us his presentation on Nagios, the extremely powerful and broadly-used monitoring suite. And tomorrow, the FreeBSD Security Officer will be giving us his BSDCan talk on VuXML. The Twin Cities open source tech scene is amazing, and growing rapidly!
Since the big Drupal conversion, tcphp.org has increased tenfold in daily traffic, with an average of 220 visitors per day. The mailing list is lively as ever and - when we hold them - meetings are great. There's even interest and opportunity for collaboration on local projects.
In light of all of this, it's sad that we're not having regular, well-planned TCPHP meetings, and I'm hoping that this email will be the beginnings of a solution. If I don't have the time to coordinate and announce a TCPHP meeting they don't happen at all. We all learn a lot and enjoy these meetings so it's a shame when they're a miss, and that's a lot of pressure for one person!
So I'm looking for help:
- First, I'm hoping we can come up with a short list of topics that would be good for the June meeting and beyond. Nothing fancy, just a list.
- Next, we need a volunteer meeting coordinator, minimally for the June meeting. This coordinator will:
- take the list of proposed topics and post them to the list with a request for a presenter. So with 3 possible topics, you'd write to the list and say "If you know enough about one of these 3 topics to lead a discussion, please contact me offlist". Then people would contact you and you'd hold 'em to showing up.
- update the meeting entry on the tcphp.org site, and send the announcement to the discussion list.
pajunas interactive has secured us a meeting space, a projector and a timeslot for us, so this isn't a major job. It is, however, an important one!
