July 14th, 2008

North Shore Web Geek Meetup this week, now with talks!

by Joshua Porter  |   6 Comments  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/789

This Thursday we’re holding the next North Shore Web Geeks Meetup, our monthly meeting for web geeks who live up in the Northeastern Mass/Southern New Hampshire area.

This month we’re changing to a new format. So far we’ve been completely unformatted…everyone simply showing up and talking for a while. This has worked out well, but it occurred to us that most of us specialize in some topic or another. For example, we have John Eckman who specializes in open source enterprise software, Will Bond who is writing his own PHP frameworks, and Tom Summit who, as a talent recruiter looks at LinkedIn in a completely different way than I ever would. In other words, we learn a lot from each other. (And these are only three of the folks out of the 100+ or so who have attended the meetings) We’ve had SEO experts, entrepreneurs of many stripes, an IP lawyer, programmers, marketers, front-end wizards, and all sorts of folks that I honestly had no idea lived in the area.

So this week I’m going to be giving a short talk…the first of what I hope to be ongoing short talks at the meetup. I’ll start it off by giving a talk on Designing for Sign-Up, the ins and outs of getting people to sign up for your web application/software. This will be a first draft of the talk I’m giving at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September. So I’ll get practice giving the talk, hopefully improving it by listening intently to the valuable discussion that follows. It will also be a fun way to help folks who are dealing with the problem and to have a point of discussion to go forward with.

Back in the spring I gave a short talk (along with Ethan, Dan, and Scott) at the Markup and Style Society meetup, and it went really well. Folks seemed to like the focus of discussion. At the North Shore meetup we’re going to try something similar, but have only one talk instead of 4.

Also, I wanted to give a shout out to the Build Guild, a meetup that just had their first gathering last week in Salem. It was started by two guys who had previously come to a North Shore web meetup, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni. I think it’s awesome to see more folks get meetups started in their towns…it sounds like they had a really good turnout. So if you live in the Salem/Peabody area and are looking for a local meetup, check it out.

For more details on Thursday’s North Shore meetup, please see one of the following places:

See you on Thursday!

Check out my latest project: Make them Care!, a book on designing great sign-up experiences. Get reminded when it's published.

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Comments

1.  Marc Amos 7:46am, Mon 14th, 2008

It’s awesome to hear about the change in format, I can’t wait to check it out on Thursday. Thanks for the shout-out as well! See you all in a few days.

2.  JC Cameron 8:32am, Mon 14th, 2008

Hey Josh, looking forward to it. I am very curious as to what you have to say regarding sign-ups.

And, what a week ahead of us (me): Web Innovators group in Boston, WebNOB in Manchester, and NSWG in Newburyport. I think my kids might start missing me at night! ;)

3.  Patrick Haney 9:02am, Mon 14th, 2008

If I can get back to Boston from Philly early enough and figure out how to get up there, I might join you. We’ve got a Refresh Boston meetup planned for early August (as soon as I get my 2 speakers confirmed on a date) in case you’re interested in coming down here again.

4.  Paul Kelley 9:03am, Mon 14th, 2008

This sounds great Josh. I really enjoyed the talk you gave at the Markup & Style Society meetup, so I’m looking forward to this.

5.  Leanne 9:04pm, Thu 17th, 2008

Great talk tonight, and thank you for hosting. Lots of good info to absorb & I plan on taking a closer look at freshbooks.com as well. On a side note, neat instant preview feature on your blog (for comments).

- The girl with the suicidal lemon.

6.  Jon Heller 8:24am, Fri 18th, 2008

Had a great time at the NSWG meetup last night. Your speech was especially useful for my job – you focused mostly on software signups, but my company focuses on signups for a free e-letter and faces the exact same hurdles. So I made a lot of mental notes for suggestions to bring to the table. Thanks!