No May Tech Tuesday

I have another commitment for Tuesday May 25, so May’s Tech Tuesday is cancelled.

Tech Tuesday #2

We’ll be at the Mixx 96 meeting room on Washington St (see below) in downtown Olympia on Tuesday, April 27 at 6pm.

Bring $5 for pizza and your interests in all topics technological — if you have ideas to discuss, post them here!

Chad Akins has volunteered to present on “the lingo, concepts, and current memes in GIS.”

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The inaugural event!

The first Tech Tuesday will be held on Tuesday, March 23 at 6pm in the Mixx 96 FM meeting room on Washington just south of State in downtown Olympia. Bring $5 to chip in on pizza.

For this event, we’ll try lightning presentations: bring a topic to present for up to 10 minutes. I’ll get a list of all the topics, and if there’s more than fits in the time, we’ll vote to select who presents. Imagine a cross between a BarCamp and Ignite.

What is it?

Tech Tuesday is collaboration and curiosity. It is an opportunity for people to share what they know and to learn something new.

Tech Tuesday is camaraderie among people who work on the web. (It’s almost certainly also food.)

What is it not?

Tech Tuesday is not for sales pitches. It’s not schmoozing. It’s not business development or gladhanding.

Tech Tuesday is not tech support. But it’s not a snooty elite either!

Hello world!

Well sure, hello world seems about right….

You may be asking yourself: what the heck is this? And who is this?

My name is Elaine Nelson. I’ve been doing things with web sites for more than 10 years now, and for the last 7 of that, I’ve lived in Olympia. (I’ve been blogging for almost 9 years, most recently at elainenelson.org.)

The last couple of years, I’ve been peripherally involved in some attempts to get together a web developer community in Olympia: went to some meetups before those petered out, offered to help with Refresh Olympia, which didn’t ever really get off the ground.

Well, after my partner bugging me for a long time about how I should do something, and then a fortuitous conversation this week, I decided to just start. There’s lots of smarts in this town, but not as much sharing and community as there could be!

It seemed to me that the biggest problem with the previous attempts was that there wasn’t a set date; events just happened “whenever.” And as people get busy or distracted, “whenever” turns into “never.” By contrast, my volunteer gigs with the Eastside Neighborhood Association and the Friends of the Olympia Library have set dates, which at least forces everybody to throw something together every month/quarter. Same deal with the writers’ group I used to be in: we met on the same day at the same place every week: builds up the habit. Besides that, you know going in that not everybody is ever going to make every session, so you don’t worry quite so much about setting a time that meets everybody’s schedule.

So: “Tech Tuesday” is nice and alliterative, and open enough of a name to allow for it not necessarily to always be about/for web professionals, but obvious enough of a name that people know WTF you’re talking about. (Vs Refresh [City Name], IMHO.)

As a starting point, I decided to put together a little survey. Then I put up this little site on a domain I happened to own already.

What’s next? Once I’ve got a dozen or so responses to the survey, I’ll announce a date, a time, and a topic — if you’re interested in presenting, please speak up! And then it’ll be Tech Tuesdays from there on out.

If you know anyone who’d be interested, please send them this link! I’ll be looking forward to meeting you on some Tuesday in the future.