After the February meeting the CINNUG Directors (Dan Hounshell, Nino Benvenuti and myself) met to discuss the goals for CINNUG over the next year. I think we have some great plans and we wanted to share them with our members.
- We reviewed the results of the survey that was sent out to our members. From this survey several items came up:
- We will start an Architecture SIG. The target is to start this within a few months. Look for more information on this soon.
- We will NOT start a VSTS SIG; however, we will target having some sort of special event (defined as an event other than our normal meetings) once a quarter. The first one will most likely target VSTS and leverage the interest in VSTS from the survey. The goal would be to have this starting in the May-July timeframe.
- We will start trying to break up the meeting format so that we have some sort of intro topic or grok talk(s), followed by pizza, followed by the main presentation. The April meeting will be our first try at this since we have two speakers for the community launch event.
- We will attempt to have some grok talks prior to our pizza and main presentation. These should be 10-15 minute mini-talks. They can be related to the main topic, or not. We will start requesting speakers for these soon.
- Starting in June we will move our normal CINNUG meetings to the Fourth Tuesday of every month, trading with CincySQL.
- It was discussed on what to do about Nov. and Dec since these are holiday months. The decision was that November would meet as normal, but December’s meeting would be changed to a party of some sort. We’ll still have it on the normal day (unless it falls on Christmas / Christmas Eve), but it’s a party not a presentation.
- We need to drive more traffic to the website to help build community outside of the meetings.
- We will start with a meeting forum where people can post their thoughts on meetings and hopefully continue the discussion outside of the meetings. This has already been started, so check out the Meetings Forum.
- We will continue to purchase a salad along with the pizza for an alternative.
- One of the open comments indicated a Patterns SIG, which we decided to not do; however, as a way of filling this request we will start doing a “Better Know a Pattern” (a good name might be helpful….so if you think of any….) after our normal CINNUG meetings. This will be after the final presentation and only for those interested in staying. Look for this to start soon.
- One of the open comments asked if we could record the presentations for download later, even if it was just audio. The idea was discussed and we decided further discussion would be needed after some research into how this would be accomplished with the least amount of pressure and impact to the presenters.
- We have decided to give speaker appreciation gifts for speakers giving the main presentations.
- We discussed the budget:
- We have a budget of $5,000 for the year (thanks to all of our Annual Sponsors!). There is an additional $1,000+ left in the account from 2007.
- We have set aside $3,000 to pay for our refreshments for the Architecture SIG and normal CINNUG meetings.
- We have set aside $600 to pay for the speaker appreciation gifts.
- The remaining amount will be used to help pay for the special events, giveaways and other costs.
- Domain name renewal (due in Sept) and iContact (due in Dec). Together these would be around $120 or so.
If you have comments or questions about any of these decisions, please feel free to contact us about them. Also, I have put up a thread to discuss them so you can start an open discussion there.
Regards,
Michael Wood, CINNUG Director