INETA

Midwest User Group tries Open Space Technology

Scott Spradlin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:29:11 GMT

The June 30th meeting of St. Louis .NET User Group tried something new -- a meeting following the Open Space Technology. OST is a method of running meetings of groups of any size. Essentially, it's a self-organizing process where the attendees construct the agenda and schedule DURING the meeting itself. How can this be? There's no way this would work. Chaos I say!

Well, we did it and I think it worked out quite well. For those new to the idea, here's a quick outline of what we did.

Everyone showed up, expecting to enjoy an evening of food, learning, and networking.
We ate food. (We always have food at our user group meetings -- the one common denominator that ties all developers together.)
We let our sponsor say a few words to the group. Kevin Grossnicklaus from SSE spoke on their behalf. Kevin was one of the original founders of our user group. We're always excited to have him come back and speak to us.
I introduced the concept of Open Spaces to a room of blank stares. Either they were full of the aforementioned food and unable to respond or were stunned by an apparent lack of planning. Meetings without PowerPoint? Say it ain't so!
We made a list of topics that people would like to discuss, talk about, or hear about. We came up with about a dozen topics and wrote them on the white board at the front. The ones that I can remember were:
- MVC Framework
- Vista vs. W2K8
- Real-time BI
- How to stay current
- Software FAILURES
- Infrastructure prep
- Agile
- SQL throttling and other tricks
I told them we'd narrow it down to a couple of groups of four and do two sessions.
We did a show of hands to see how many people would be interested in each of the topics. A couple of the topics got a big vote. A few topics received only a handful. The bulk of them received the "average" vote.
We decided to do two sessions, one in individual groups and a second one all together to cover the topic with the most votes. One group went to talk about Agile methodology; one group to talk about Vista vs W2K8 and one group discussed software failures.
Coming back together, our local Microsoft Architect Evangelist Clint Edmonson helped lead the discussion on ways to stay current in the industry. He blogged about the topic and captured most of the content of that session plus photos! I encourage you to read Clint's post. We didn't get any photos of Clint because he was our photographer! (Thanks Clint!)
We handed out attendance prizes. Here's a photo of one of our members, local genius Eric Lynn, winning the coveted MSDN post-it cube. Wow, was he excited or what? We should give out more of those apparently.

So, that's essentially the way it happened. The moral of the story is user groups are filled with smart people that have great ideas and love to share them. I encourage you to try an Open Space night at your user group and see what happens.

Technorati Tags: User group

TechEd 2008

Scott Spradlin — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:00:34 GMT

So this year TechEd is divided into two weeks -- one focused on developers and one on IT Pros -- and I'm going as a representative of INETA. We'll have a spot in the community area. INETA is also a big force behind the BOF sessions. If you haven't been to one of those in the past, try to check them out this year.

On Monday, June 2 from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm we're having an INETA Community Leadership Summit to get the week kicked off right. If you're on Facebook, go add this event.

Technorati Tags: INETA,Conferences

Facebook at the Party With Palermo

Scott Spradlin — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:43:28 GMT

Another good party with Jeffrey Palermo at DevTeach in Toronto. Always good to meet up with old friends and make new ones.

Jeffrey and I showed up a bit early for the party at Menage. What a great view on the outside patio overlooking the city street. Geeks would be arriving in droves momentarily. Given the typical percentages of male/female attendees at these events and user groups in general, I was surprised when a young woman showed up by herself and sat at a table by herself near the back.

Turns out that her name was Kate and she was there by invitation from a friend that was late. She was feeling like the "odd man out" since she was only one of two or three females in the room so far. Kate mentioned she had a friend that is studying gender in the IT field. (Maybe not that generic...I'll have to get the details later.)

But interestingly enough, Kate was getting her PhD by researching young adult's use of facebook. I thought that was fascinating. Scott Hanselman was in the area and I introduced the two of them -- I thought he might find her field of study interesting.

Maybe we'll get Kate or her friend in front of some Canada user groups to discuss gender issues. Any volunteers?

Technorati Tags: INETA,Social,Conferences

Headed to DevTeach

Scott Spradlin — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:07:54 GMT

I am headed to Toronto Canada for DevTeach tomorrow. Scott Hanselman has the keynote first thing Tuesday morning. Lots of great sessions planned and networking with fellow user group leaders and members from Canada. What a great country. Everyone I've met from up there has been incredibly nice.

Monday night is the traditional Party With Palermo. That's always a great place to catch up with a lot of familiar faces at these events.

I'm also looking forward to the .NET Rocks hosted panel discussion on the 14th. Carl and Richard will be talking with folks who have strong visions of the future of software development and the role that .NET can play in that future.

Plus, there are an incredible number of great sessions at these DevTeach events. If you are in Canada, you need to try to make it to one of these events. They happen twice a year. Check out their web site ... Montreal in December 08

Technorati Tags: Conferences,INETA