South Florida Social Geeks

Leaving Meetup.com

Feb 022011

Attn: Meetup.com’s South Florida Social Geeks

For those of you are unaware, or haven’t been to meetup.com in quite some time, last Friday, they made some extremely radical changes which have several organizers, including myself, are not happy with. As a result, there is currently a rebellion against meetup.com and a mass exodus from their service.

If you’d like to read more about this, before I proceed, I would recommend reading the following blog posts:

Since we are local geeks, several of us within the New Tech Community are actually building our own, open-sourced, non-proprietary solution that will follow web standards to give us interoperability with several other online services, and allow give our users data portability.

To learn more, and be part of the BETA when it becomes available, please sign up at:

http://weheardyourconcerns.com/

NOTE: If you are a developer, graphic designer, or have any interest in helping us build this project, please contact me directly.

As a temporary work-around, until a more permanent solution can either be found or built, we have chosen to move our mailing list and communication to a Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/group/south-florida-social-geeks

As of this writing, we’re keeping this group closed. It may be open at a future time, but until we get settled, I do not want to confuse any new members.

I ask that you please take a moment to head over there and sign up if only so we can stay in touch about the status of our group and where we are going. It is important to keep in mind, this will not be for event management, it is just a way that I can communicate with you more quickly.

For event management, we will continue to post events

on our blog:http://sflsocialgeeks.org
on our Facebook FAN Page: http://facebook.com/sflsocialgeeks
on our Facebook Group page: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=127624833514
on our Twitter account: http://twitter.com/sflsocialgeeks

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve probably been wondering why you were manually removed from our Meetup group. Since Meetup is using a proprietary internal mailing list system, I do not have everyone’s email address to send each and every one of you a personalized invitation. Therefore, I am following the guide to shut our meetup down as provided here:

How (and Why) to Shut Down Your Meetup Group – For Good
http://greentechgirl.com/internet/how-to-shut-down-your-meetup-group/

I apologize in advance if this causes any issues or inconvenience for any of you.

I thank you for your support and look forward to seeing you at our next, or future, events.

Sincerely,

Marc K.
South Florida Social Geeks Community Manager

TechCrunch Meetup Wrap Up

Blog, meetup No Responses »

Jun 192010

Thanks to everyone that came out on Friday, June 11th, to our TechCrunch Meetup.

For those of you who missed out, or did not hear about it, it all started on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 after TechCrunch announced that they were going to be holding Meetups nation-wide to celebrate their 5th birthday. Later that same day, Steve Repetti, the Fort Lauderdale Organizer and member of the Data Portability Board, contacted me to inquire if our Social Geeks group might be interested in participating/attending. After a few emails back-and-forth, I expressed that not only were we interested, but that I would welcome the opportunity to help plan/organize it with him. It didn’t take long for us to formulate a plan and the pieces started to fall into place.

Our first successful hurtle came with the securing of our venue. We knew we wanted this to be a party, not an “event”, and that being South Floridians, we wanted it by, or on the beach. Enter Ocean Manor Hotel. Located just behind their property sat probably one of the best kept secrets in South Florida, the Bamboo Beach Tiki Bar:

Within just a few short days, the number of meetups worldwide quickly rose and we quickly found ourselves competing with over 363 other Meetups worldwide just to get ONE of 50 tickets, worth almost $3000, to their TechCrunchDisrupt conference next year in New York.

But we were not going to sit ideally by while other cities tried to pass us. We reached out to the rest of our community and the response was incredible. The result was, what we believe, was one of the best parties the South Florida tech community had seen in a long time.

By Friday, June 11th, the South Florida technological community had gathered together to show the rest of the country that ‘Silicon Beach’ is not just a slogan, but a state of mind.

We had representatives from several of the major local technology groups show up, including: