Daily Archives: March 29, 2005

If you could read only one blog….

Community Cheerleading

…which would it be?

Lately, this thought has popped into my head every time I read a new post from Elizabeth Grigg’s blog.

But of course, I would probably go into some type of withdrawal shock if I couldn’t “blog surf” like I do frequently throughout the day. And I would stop being constantly challenged to learn a gazillion new things about programming which is the result of reading (or scanning or surfing or whatever) such a great variety of different blogs.

But Beth’s blog is definitely a stop and smell the roses kind of thing…kind of like having the t.v. channel stuck on PBS.

http://www.AcehAid.org

Want to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

dotNET

What does it mean to Sponsor a Vermont.NET meeting?

What you do: Pay for the pizza and soda

What you get:

  • Get your company logo on the homepage of our website (www.vtdotnet.org) during the time of promoting the meeting (and afterwards sometimes if I don’t update for the next meeting right away)
  • Get your company  logo and thanks to you in all emails that go out to our lists that are geared towards promoting the meetings. We have a member list of 200 members, as well as a meeting announcement list that is those 200 + 100 more. That’s 300 people who have explicitly asked to receive these emails!
  • Get your logo on our THANK YOU slide that is in the powerpoint deck that plays during the meeting “warm up” and that I review at the beginning of my meeting. More info on this…
  • If you would like, we can have literature about your products available to attendees.
  • Our undying gratitude.

Take a look at the upcoming meeting schedule. Where there is not an INETA Sponsored event (note the logo below the speaker’s name), we can use a pizza/soda sponsor. Our meetings can have anywhere from 20 – 40 attendees though we have had 50 on a few occasions, so the cost of sponsorship varies.

I can’t believe it took me three years to think of blogging for pizza for my user group!! 🙂



http://www.AcehAid.org

User Group Dilemmas -The widening gap between .NET Newbies and .NET Pros

dotNET

Reading Jerry Delany’s post about attending the Atlanta.NET meeting and a comment he made at the end about attending the Atlanta C# meetings because they are more advanced made me think of a problem I have been pondering lately with my user group , Vermont.NET, that is not uncommon.

We have been meeting for 3 years now – since Feb 2002. There are plenty of pepole in the group who have come frequently to meetings since the beginning and they are many who are pretty advanced. Yet we still have new people coming into the meeting all of the time. Of course, this is a microcosm of the whole programming community and not a new problem. I don’t want to have to choose between sating the more advanced .NET programmers and ignoring the needs of those who are just moving to .NET.

What we are talking about (and I am waiting for someone in the group to grab this project and run with it…) is having a pre-meeting presentation that is more for beginners and then let the regular presentation continue to engage those who are interested in more advanced topics. There are many groups who do this so we can certainly learn from them. My idea is to have the beginner talks be done by user group members, which has so many advantages.

How is your user group dealing with the widening gap between .NET newbies and .NET pros?

update: I emailed Chris Pels who runs the Boston.NET User group and has been doing a 2-part meeting for two years. We will have an article on this in the April INETA Newsletter. If you aren’t signed up for the newsletter (which you can do from the home page), they are archived at www.ineta.org/newsletters.

http://www.AcehAid.org