.NET user group for the greater San Luis Obispo area and Central Coast of California.

Justin Couto has informed us of a .NET user group that meets every 2nd Tuesday of the month. Everyone is encouraged to attend, including those who are new to the .NET world.

Check out their website at http://www.slodotnet.org/. If you would like to present at or sponsor one of their meetings, please contact the administrator at info@slodotnet.org for more information.

Bill Moyers "The Net at Risk"

Bill Moyers has a website dedicated to issues in America. He picked three topics and one of them is a technology related topic. The Net at Risk series delves into the importance of the Net on our society.

COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS
"The Net @ Risk" takes viewers to Lafayette, Louisiana, where residents and officials took on their phone company, BellSouth, and their cable company, Cox Communications, and built their own high-speed fiber network after the firms refused to bring true broadband connections to their community. Both telcom giants lobbied the state legislature to block Lafayette's plan, citing unfair competition. Ultimately, lawmakers put it to a vote to let residents decide. The measure allowing the community-built network passed overwhelmingly. BellSouth then filed suit, delaying construction by more than a year, before losing their case in court.

The Community Connections section resonates with Ken Dozier's presentation (skip to slide 31) at the Softec Symposium. Ken talked about a small community that decided to bring fiber to their homes as a community project. Bill Moyers also highlights a small town that decided to take on broadbad access as a public utility. He talks about how the economic and political vitality of small towns is greatly affected by their broadband penetration. Thomas Friedman in the "World is Flat" also talks about how we are far behind in our Broadband penetration compared to the rest of the industrialized world and how this will affect our competitiveness in the information age. As a remote technology worker this issue hits home. My ability to work effectively is directly proportional to by bandwidth (both down and up). I'm also in the gaming industry and it's amazing to see the breakthough's in the Korean and Japanese markets due to broadband and wireless penetration.

Should the Information Super Highway be a public utility like the commerce highways are? What role if any should associations like softec play in bringing up these topics into the local politics?

Events and Meetings in Google Calendar

All of us struggle with keeping up with the constant barrage of events in the local community that we'd like to attend. Getting this information into our calendars usually means subscribing to mailing lists or visiting each site individually and adding the events by hand into your calendar of choice. For those of you that use Google calendar or any iCal compliant calendar app we have good news. We've created a Softec Event Calendar

Just click on the subscribe link to add it to your Google calendar or to add it to your calendar application. If you use Google Calendar you also have the option to have it send you sms messages 10 minutes before each event. That's come in handy when I'm not in front of my computer quite a few times.

Enjoy

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