Asymptomatic

As many people know, I enjoy going into the city to attend technology events. I actually ran the Philadelphia WordPress meetup for a while, and I've attended many other meetups, including the blogger meetup, PANMA events, the PhillyCHI design slam, the Philly Standards meetup, DrupalCamp, and the Philly PHP meetup. I've even presented topics at a couple of these meetings. While all of these meetups have been fun and educational, I think it would be beneficial to have some events exclusive to the suburbs and attract suburban developers who might want to attend regular meetings without having to drag themselves into the city every month.

With the economy the way it is, some folks might consider it useful to informally enhance their skills or extend them into other areas. Networking with other people in these fields could also lead to more industry contacts when times get rough.

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I found a list of events that Abby's going to participate in with her Girl Scout's Brownie troop over the next couple of months. Apparently, Berta gets emails from their scout leader every so often with a list of updated events and notices. I think this is an effective way to keep in touch with the troupe, but I think there's room for improvement technologically.

It might be nice to have a published calendar of events, along with a feed that parents could consume in Outlook, Google Calendar, or in my case, Lightning. I've discovered that meetup.com provides iCal feeds that make it easy to subscribe to events. Of course, there are my usual misgivings with meetup.com, particularly that it's a paid service and that they retain control of the data so that you can't move it elsewhere when you decide you can't pay them anymore. So I think there should be a better, open solution.

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I've registered for PodCamp Ohio on June 28th, which takes place in Columbus. Podcamp is all about podcasting - having some kind of beyond-written blog with syndication. I think PodCamps aren't going to be my best venue -- I'd like to try more of a barcamp. It would be ideal if there was another BlogPhiladelphia, alas I've heard nothing and the people who I might have expected to be involved aren't talking about it. Oh, well.

I've been thinking about presenting something at the PodCamp to accumulate more for item 30 on my 43things. I'll be adding to this count shortly with another Philly PHP meetup presentation at the end of April, this time on PHP testing. For the PodCamp presentation (which is really more of a group-leading, since it's an "unconference"), I was thinking about talking about software tools for podcasters.

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