Last night's meeting of the Greater Charleston .NET User Group marked some high (and low) points for our young (< 1 year old) group.
First, the high points:
- Our INETA speaker, Steven Smith of ASPAlliance.com was excellent. He presented a lot of information (most of it new to our members) in a very effective format. Plenty of demos and discussion. He definitely knows his material and didn't stumble over any of the tougher questions (and there were a few).
- Our giveaways were pretty terrific. Our sponsors have really been kicking it into overdrive and we have TONS of cool stuff to give away in the coming months. Not just books and tshirts, but full software packages. Last night we gave away a fully licensed copy of MS Office 2003 Professional, 3 MS Press books: Programming Visual Basic .NET 2003 (Balena), Programming Windows with Visual Basic .NET (Petzold) & Visual Basic .NET Programmer's Cookbook (MacDonald). Almost $500 worth of books and software right there, and that wasn't all of it. We also gave away about 10 MSDN tshirts, an insane amount of .NET related magazines, and several titles for upcoming book reviews. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say we handed out nearly $1000 worth of swag.
- Membership saw a boost as well. We got our first corporate membership last night as well as another individual paid member. I'll spare you the speech (at the moment) on why paid memberships are necessary, but they go a long way towards helping keep GC.NUG limber.
Now the not so high points:
- overall turnout was LOWWW, I mean depressingly low. Our meetings usually average about 30-40 people but last night was around 15. This is in spite of some of the most aggressive promoting we've done so far. I'm assuming it's just a fluke and a case of too many folks having other stuff come up. I'd hate to think it was indicative of future meetings.
- the pizza was delicious, but I (yes me) ordered ENTIRELY too much of it. This was based partly on past trends where an extra 10-15 people show up who never responded to the monthly pizza poll. So I ordered too much. At least I know what's for lunch today.
- some key people didn't make it to the meeting. This isn't their fault, but it's also a good example of why I tend to appoint helpers as needed rather than formalizing roles. That's a lesson I learned from my previous user group. (Although the few “permanent“ roles I have assigned are being filled quite well. No complaints there.) The folks that didn't make it didn't give me any indication that they wouldn't be there. (Trust me I can come up with filler... just try shutting me up)
Next month's meeting should be a good one. Hmm... I say that a lot don't I? ;)
Seriously though, Lou Vega is speaking on Compact Framework Mobile Development. It will be the first GC.NUG meeting I miss (I'll be at Tech*Ed) but I'm confident things will go smoothly in my absence. Somebody gave me some good advice once... “Pick people you trust, and then trust the people you've picked...”
C.