I haven’t written about DC-local tech meetups or networking events for a while, so I thought I’d dip my toes back into the social waters. As you might recall, I’m a big fan of real-world technology and social media meetups, not just because they’re, you know, fun, but because it’s a great way to do both traditional networking, and to expand your working knowledge of how people actually use social media and online community tools.
Likewise, it’s a way to build your friends and followers networks on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other useful social media sites, especially if you’re just starting out (or just generally want to expand your social circle online.)
Note that while I’m in the DC metro area, this is not a phenomena restricted to big (well, big-ish) cities — by way of example, a friend of mine just sent me a link about a Web 2.0-focused Meetup group in Roanoke (a small city in southwestern Virginia), where small business owners are just as interested in how to use social media as the rest of us.
If you’re in a smaller city or town, you might find a bigger challenge trying to get together a critical mass of like-minded folks, but then again, you have a bigger opportunity to step up and take a leadership role and make an impact.
Anyway, on to some two short reviews. (Note that due to fully-forseen circumstances — big slacker — I neglected to take any photos, which may have been useful.)
* The July Washington Blogger Meetup was another installment of this casual monthly meetup, though just the second at its new location (Madam’s Organ, in the trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC).
I’ve been involved with this group for a number of years now — membership has ebbed and flowed over time and locations, though it seems to be revitalized by the new location and new leadership (you can also see the blogroll here).
This meetup has always been a kind of funny neither-fish-nor-fowl thing, since it’s neither completely social (being on a Wednesday night) nor completely topically-driven (no seminars or speaker presentations, though we’ll be starting out the meetings with a Blogging 101 component to help bring in new folks). However, it also has the advantage of leveraging the great DCBlogs feed, which is run by Pat, one of the co-organizers of the Meetup. The feed is a pretty great resource for the DC blog community, by aggregating and highlighting blog feeds from across the DC blogopshere, and it’s one of the hubs of the “social” axis of the DC tech community.
* The Summer of Gov Happy Hour was a social event celebrating of a couple of events in the Gov 2.0 space — the 1-year anniversary of GovLoop, an influential and growing government community built on the Ning platform (GovLoop’s founder, Steve Ressler, is based in Tampa, which shows that you don’t have to be inside the Beltway to have an impact on Gov 2.0), and the wrap of the 2009 AppsForDemocracy community edition competition, a contest where citizen coders created applications pulling from DC open public data.
As a primarily celebratory and social event, there was no set agenda. The crowd was a pretty good mix of government, advocacy groups and nonprofits, contracting companies, and interested bystanders (like myself). In addition to reconnecting with people I’d met at other government transparency and gov 2.0-focused events, I did meet up with some new folks, many of whom were looking to hook up with folks working on particular projects or having particular skill sets (I facilitated a few introductions, hope I didn’t steer anyone wrong).
So, this is just a small sample of stuff that’s going on in my corner of the social media world. (And it’s summer, which is when things supposedly slow down.) If you’ve got your own piece of the action, I’d love to hear how your real-world meetup strategy is working, especially if you’re outside a major urban center, so please leave a comment.
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