Recently Justin Lilly and I have taken up the day-to-day running of the Django-NYC users group to take some load off its original founders, Loren Davie and Kevin Fricovsky. Loren and Kevin have done a great job of getting the group off the ground and building a community around Django in NYC. Unfortunately, as with most user groups, running Django-NYC has become a very time consuming venture. Accordingly they asked Justin and I to come in and help out for a while.As part of this change of guard Justin and I have started a few new initiatives for the group to try and get more people involved. These initiatives include recording talks, holding hack nights, providing tutorial events, and reaching out to more Django-friendly organizations around New York.
Simplest and most accessible of these initiatives is the recordings of talks from our meetings. We now have the recordings available as a podcast (iTunes, RSS) and a Vimeo channel. We are also experimenting with streaming the meetings live at livestream.com.
Hack Nights provide a great way for those of us with active Django projects to work in a collaborative environment. The rules for a hack night are that you have to come with a project to work on and you will be strongly pushed to show off your work at the end of the night. So far we've held only one hack night, but we are in the process of planning more and refining the event format. These are great events for our more advanced members since they are able to get some work done and talk to others about their specific challenges/solutions.
Tutorials are the yin to the hack nights' yang. They will provide a venue for new Django users to dig their teeth into Django and learn about its awesomeness. Our first tutorial is coming up this week and we are very excited to see how it goes.
Finally we are reaching out to various Django-friendly organizations around the city to participate in all of these new events. HUGE has been and will continue to be and excellent host and supporter of the group. That being said, Brooklyn is kind of a pain for many potential members to get to. Accordingly we will be moving events around the city in an effort to better engage Djangonauts from all around New York. The first such event will be our tutorial session this week which is being hosted by Six Apart. Additionally we are working to collaborate better with other NYC user groups, in particular NYCPython. This December we will be holding a joint meeting and we are discussing other possible collaborative events.
So that's all of the new stuff happening with Django-NYC for now. Stay tuned for updates on even more that we have lined up. Have any other ideas? Belong to an organization who would like to host an event? Have any questions or comments? Let me know in the comments or contact me at sean@seanoc.com.