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by Sam Gentile.
Original Post: What is Sam Doing?/Beantown.NET status
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So I said that we were going to have a meeting tonight to decide the status of Beantown.NET. After a year of operation, some things work well and some not so well. A lot of this had to do with what I am doing and frankly in the last month and a half, that has been totally up in the air. As of a few weeks ago, I had accepted a job as an Architect of Indigo Services at a company in Atlanta that is rolling out Indigo services/Yukon and Whidbey and our family had begun to make moving preparations. It was a very exciting opportunity. When my Father-In-Law became much worse, it made sense to stay here at this time. At the same time, I had an equally wonderful opportunity here that leveraged my community skills and went in a direction that I wanted to move into: evangelism and helping customers understand SOA/Web Services and .NET in the context of a particular product line, as well as building custom .NET/WS solutions based on particular needs. So Monday I begin a job with a firm that has development offices in Waltham Mass and Redmond that begins with “M”. Thats all I am willing to say at the moment.
Back to our meeting. Now established that I was staying in the area, I have reaffirmed my commitment to leading, driving and facilitating Beantown. I had great discussions and help from both Chris Pels (congrats on INETA President!) and my most excellent DE Thom Robbins. Once I made my strong commitment to the group membership tonight, I facilitated a white board discussion with the help of my co-leader Jason Haley in finding whats working and whats not working so well, as well as seeing where we should go in the next year. What was most important to me was seeing if the group members felt it was important to continue to have a downtown Boston group given the most excellent Boston.NET in Waltham. It was good to hear that the need is still just as great for people who work and live in the Financial District of Boston and can't get out to Waltham to have this group. One area of great feedback is that members felt a great personal attention as well in being in a much smaller group. We decided a couple of major things:
Rather than reinvent the wheel with our own ASP.NET 2.0 portal, our new web committee will continue our commitment to DotNetNuke except upgrading from 2.0 to 3.0
Our membership tracking/mailing sucks and we have a volunteer to fix just that as well as one to work on new members
We have a new volunteer to liaison with the book and software companies that offer incentives to INETA groups to make sure we are taking care of making sure our members have access to all of this
We are starting new communication mechanisms. Rather than a mailing list, for now, all our local members will create accounts on the portal and use the existing forums so that we can have a closer relationship with each other and get other needs met
I think that's most of it. I am very excited both with my new direction in life and the continued success of
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