From the INETA NORAM Feb 2007 Newsletter:

Elections are being held for the INETA NorAm Board of Directors in mid-March. From now through February 15, 2007 any user group leader of an INETA registered user group in the United States and Canada can nominate an individual for a Board position. The nominee can be any member of the developer community and does not have to be a user group leader. Experience and familiarity with the operation and needs of the user group community is beneficial. You cannot nominate yourself, but any other user group leader may, so get someone to nominate you.

Read  more here…

I seem to be “just a girl who can’t say no”.

• Sept 6th CNY.NET (Syracuse NY – INETA) Advanced Data Access with ADO.NET 2.0
• Sept 11th Vermont.NET (Burlington, VT home sweet home) Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0
• Sept 12th Cleveland .NET SIG (OH – INETA) Asynchronous ASP.NET 2.0
• Sept 13th Findlay .NET (OH – INETA) 5 (Supposedly) Scary Things about .NET
• Sept 14th Dayton.NET (OH – INETA) Web Services Security for Humans: Security Fundamentals

What was I thinking?! 🙂 Of course, it will be a blast!

I’m psyched to be hopping down to NYC tomorrow do an INETA sponsored presentation at NYCdotNETDev. I lived in New York from 1983 to 1991 (as you can imagine, my impressionable 20’s), so it’s fun to go back once in a while. I plan to spend Friday at the MOMA and eating great food with friends before taking a late night flight back to Burlington. It’s only a one hour flight, so it’s a nice and easy trip.

I’ll be presenting on Query Notifications, a topic near and dear to my heart. Most user groups find this a little narrow no matter how fascinating I find it! 🙂 So I’m happy that these guys were interested in this talk.

http://www.sadeveloper.net/The SA Developer Gauteng team (Gauteng is a province in South Africa that includes Johannesburg) all met in the Microsoft offices in Jo’burg to attend the most recent INETA Live Webcast. Andre Odendaal wrtes about doing this and how valuable he thinks these webcasts are to u.g. leaders.

Scott Spradlin has cranked out the INETA NORAM July Newsletter. In it, I interview fellow INETA Speaker, Brian Noyes, who has had a path into a development career that is more unusual than most! Check it out along with all of the other NORAM news.

(from the INETA NORAM website:)

On June 1st INETA North America launched an extensive new Sponsorship Program aimed at raising funds to expand and improve services for our members. Over the past six months the INETA NorAm Sponsorship Team, led by Sponsorship Director Pat Tormey, has designed a great program with many options for sponsorship at a variety of levels. In the four years since our founding, INETA has grown tremendously and to deliver programs and services to our members requires substantial funding and volunteer time. During the past year the INETA NorAm Board of Directors has targeted key areas for expansion and growth to better serve our members. As part of that strategic analysis it became evident we needed to establish a substantial and diverse sponsor base.

The new Sponsorship Program consists of four main levels of sponsorship (Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze) and a wide range of services from which a custom sponsorship program is designed for each sponsor. The services available to sponsors focus on INETA’s key strength of providing the opportunity to reach a targeted audience of software developers focused on Microsoft technologies. 

If you are interested in learning more about INETA sponsorship programs, please email [email protected].

Best Practices for Running a User Group
June 28th, 2006 – 3:30PM EST

Running a user group is not an easy task. However luckily by being part of INETA you are connected to network of peers that have experienced all aspects of user group leadership from start-up to success. This webcast will be a panel based discussion featuring experts such as Chris Williams, INETA Membership Manager NC, SC and D’Arcy Lussier, INETA Membership Manager, Central Canada.

Come and join the conversation on important user group topics such as:

• Building a Leadership Team
• Picking a Location
• Running a Successful Event
• Working with Sponsors

Tonight is the last game of the Stanley Cup. Edmonton and Raleigh have both won three games so this is it. I was really surprised that the attendees of the New Brunswick .NET user group stayed for the whole meeting. Even my husband is at the local pub cheering on the Edmonton Oilers!

Posted from BLInk!

The June 2006 INETA newsletter came out last week. Althought there’s alot of very interesting news in there, I was excited to see the interview of INETA Speaker Bureau member Phil Weber get out in the wild. I had fun asking questions but was astonished at some of his answers. Rather than spoil the fun, I’ll point to the newsletter!

Also in the newsletter: a new logo,  new tag line and a new fleshed out Sponsorship program!

There’s lots of INETA stuff going on at TechEd. A regional User Group Leader meeting (all are invited) on Sunday, June 11th and of course the Birds of a Feather sessions! This will be the first TechEd/PDC that I am not leading a BOF as I wasn’t sure of my travel schedule, but there are a ton of awesome BOFs scheduled.

So if you didn’t get the June Newsletter in your email, you can go right to the website to read all the news (that’s fit to print)!

The second INETA Live! session was held on Wednesday: Starting a User Group. This was presented by Dave Noderer, Jason Beres and myself. Unfortunately a nasty thunder and lightning storm that started just as the webcast began forced me to bail. Even during the first few minutes while I was explaining what a user group is, I was a wee bit distracted watching some b-i-g lightning bolts in the sky. My house got struck by lightning last summer, so I take no chances. I had to power down and unplug everything. I got back online and on the webcast aout 15 minutes before the end. Of course Dave, Jason, Amanda, Theresa and Chris had done an amazing job. 🙂

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Dave Noderer, Jason Beres and I will be doing an INETA Live webcast this Wednesday, May 31st at 3:30 EST, about Starting a User Group.

Dave started and runs one of the larger groups (a consortium of groups, actually) in the U.S., Florida .NET, which Jason helped start. I started and run Vermont.NET, one of the smaller groups in the U.S. With our involvement in INETA oer the years, Dave and I have talked with many many user group leaders and done lots of hand holding to groups that were just getting going. So we bring a lot to the table

You can register for the Live Meeting at live.ineta.org.