Our .NET User Group held their second -thon event. This event definitely works for our UG by creating a good turnout AND by GETTING MEMBERS INVOLVED. This will definitely be an annual event for our UG. Both of ours have been in June - last meeting before the summer meetings begin. Here's how ours worked.
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Pick a topic
- that easily breaks into small segments (10-15 minute presentation)
- general in nature
- that affords opportunity for novice and intermediate information
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Recruit Presenters (about 6)
- that have never presented before
- that ask questions
- suggest sub-topics
- provide mentoring - for slides and code
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Recruit A Host
- that is technical AND entertaining
- that can protect the presenter from the group (if needed)
- that can help answer questions asked to the presenter
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Change the menu
- provide something besides pizza
- we do wings & things (wings & sweets)
2005 - “Datagrid marathon“
ASP.NET datagrid - presentations ranging from formating the datagrid to using templated columns
2006 - “Tool-a-thon“
Open-source, free tools available for the .NET Developer (included tools such as NUnit, NHibernate, Refactor..)