Lightning Talk Announcement

I'm planning to talk about TechCorridor.io as a lightning talk.

This is basically what I'm planning to say; I figure it's a good idea to run it by the group before saying something at the meetup that I can't take back!

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We have a great local technical community in the Iowa City and Cedar Rapids area, but not all of us know each other as well as we should. We have a lot of various meetups, but organizers and speakers can be spread a little thin between them. In addition, interests come and go -- Perl isn't what it used to be, for example -- and our community has to be resilient to that kind of change.

We also want to make it really easy to bring the entire tech community together at events [like this Friday]. We want to do this more often. To facilitate this, many of the local tech meetups are joining forces as TechCorridor.io. All tech meetups in the area are welcome to join us. There's strength in numbers.

How do we know this can work? This plan is modeled after NewHaven.io in Connecticut. I was a cofounder of NewHaven.rb (the Ruby meetup there) and it merged with other local meetups to become a thriving meetup with almost 700 members. I think we can do that here, too.

So what's going to change?

• Iowa Web Devs (the largest of the local tech meetups) is going to be rebranded as TechCorridor.io.
• Nothing about current meetup administration has to change, but organizers are encouraged to at least post their events on the TechCorridor.io Meetup.
• Want to post events just on the TechCorridor.io Meetup? That's great. Need to have a separate identity for your group? That's great too. Just let us know what we can do to help!

TechCorridor.io isn't meant to replace great efforts like Dev/Iowa and Iowa Tech Chicks, but rather to complement (and compliment) them. We share many of the same goals, but TechCorridor.io is purely a community-driven effort. It will survive as long as the Corridor tech community survives, even if an organizer doesn't have enough time, an organizer moves away, a company goes out of business, or funding dries up. This is an important foundation for our community to build on.

IC Ruby will be merging into TechCorridor.io over time, as will OpenHack Iowa City and Geek Out Go Out [probably, depending on what Steve thinks]; I'm a co-organizer of these groups and would still be a big part of making them take place.

Specifically, a Ruby meetup can be named like this on the TechCorridor.io Meetup:

[Ruby] Controlling robots with Artoo

A Python meetup can be named similarly:

[Python] Getting started with Django

(or one for JavaScript, .Net, etc.)

That opens local meetups up to larger audiences. If you wanted to make a Clojure meetup, for example, you'll have a much easier time finding people that are interested. Another example: a meetup about agile, which is a discipline that cuts across our community.

If you are trying to hire a developer here, or even found a company, we hope to make it as easy as we can for you to get connected. If you just moved here and have tech chops, you will have a much better chance of being introduced to all the right people.

So let's make the Corridor an even better place for techies. Let's make it really easy to spread the word about the next local hackathon or conference and bring everyone together.

One more thing:

We've started a TechCorridor.io Slack account with all these goals in mind. Not familiar with Slack? It's a chat room service; basically IRC for the 21st century. We have channels for different topics like #dotnet, #ios, #ruby, #sql, and #web. We have about 50 members right now. You're invited to join the discussion!

It's currently invite-only (we're looking into making it public), but give us your email address in this Google form (TBD) and we'll send you an invitation.

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Finally, I thought I'd mention to you guys that I made an #admin channel for Meetup administration discussion: https://techcorridorio.slack.com/messages/admin/. (The IRC channel that once existed on freenode is now officially dead.)