New Years Resolution Board Meeting

We met to discuss the goals for the year to review the past year and to define a strategy for this year. It was a bit like deciding on a New Year's resolution list. We covered many of the organizational favorites like:

• Plan better
• Follow through on tasks
• Increase attendance
• Clarify our Mission
• Focus on above Mission

One of the hotly debated topics was "Who is the target audience?". A couple freshmen in the group complained about a lack of Technical focus because of the expectation they had of an association called Softec. Others warned that if was too technical most of the audience would be lost. The applied technology focus seemed to garner the most nods.

Some of the takeaways were:

• Networking and building of local Social Capital is still the most important item. The monthly meetings are the key to this. We should focus on getting good content and marketing each event.
• The business registry and allowing more visibility into the community members would be helpful. LinkedIn has a group interface that would help community members visualize the network http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=groups_guidelines and could spark more networking. We could put an invitation to the group in the mailing list or on the website.
• We should spread out the work to presentors and across board members and down to willing general members. Maybe giving the community more power would help bring out those aspiring technical writers.
• Professional development is in high demand and local tech business owners are more likely to encourage their employees to join if they feel their employees will be educated.
• We need more content on the website but who has the time to manage it. The first oppurtunity could be to just leveraging the presentation content and capturing the output (short summary, slideshow, and maybe even a video capture). Also using more community driven concepts like Blogs and wikis could spread the load around to those who are passionate enough to want to write about local tech issues.

Here is Mind Map of what softec could mean