Well, I’m happy to report that the Minnesota LoCo successfully pulled off their first in-person event! Granted, this was nothing like the Venezuelan release party, but it will certainly do for now. We had about thirty people show up (one person reported counting 28, but we had some trickle in and out in the middle), which was half the capacity of the room and six times the number I was sure were coming ahead of time.
Overall, I’d classify the event as a good start, and a learning experience. Things didn’t go exactly as I had envisioned, for a handful of reasons, but was still generally good. People were able to meet some other like-minded folks, a lot of people had questions that we were able to answer, and people seemed to walk away happy and enthused. I would have liked to have it be more social so people could mingle with the other folks there more, and have some development-related stuff I’ll need to follow up with for the CSci students at some later date as we ran out of time.
On the way out, I was able to spend a few minutes talking with Jeremy from TCLUG, and we kicked around the possibility of working together on an installfest perhaps in mid-to-late January, so keep an eye out for updates in that area!
If you were there (or have heard about it from those who were), it would be helpful to hear what your thoughts were - things that were good about the event, things that we should consider doing differently next time, or even general ideas of things we should think about doing as a team, please be sure to share them!
By the way, many thanks to the University of Minnesota ACM student chapter for donating their time and access to get us a great room on campus to host the event.