Happy New Year from atx-osg!

[Sara Safavi]

Happy 2015, atx-osg'ers!

Between Meetup & the mailing list, over the past year Austin Open Source GIS has grown to over 150 members. This is awesome. I'm so happy to have met so many of you, and it's so gratifying to know there's a real interest in Austin for open source mapping and FOSS-geo-related things. Thanks to those of you who've stuck it out since I rebooted the original Meetup group a little over 12 months ago - and thanks to everyone else who's joined our tribe since then. I can't wait to see what we do in the next 12 months.

Feel free to skip the rest of this over-long email, but if possible please take a second and visit: 
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VR2XM7J

Your end-of-year feedback shapes our group for next year -- please fill that out if you can! 5 questions, totally anonymous, totally optional. 

Coming Up In 2015

My hope for our community in 2015 is just that we continue doing what we do, with minimal upheaval. Whether meeting up at Black Star to catch up with friends, pulling out laptops for project show & tell or hack-ish sessions, or getting together for tech talks: 2015's going to be much the same as 2014. The only change is that we're moving from quarterly "tech nights" to monthly - we now have enough members, and enough interest, to sustain that throughout the year. (Yay!). With exceptions for special events, we're also going to stick with the same two venues (Black Star & Rackspace) throughout the year. If you'd like to request a special event (e.g., Hack Night South Austin? Eastside Happy Hour? etc) just let me know! 

Meetup vs. Mailing List

After a year-long semi-experiment, it seems that although most of our members are on Meetup, there's still quite a few who prefer keeping up via the mailing list only. That's totally fine, and likewise in 2015 I'm going to keep double-posting all group emails (like this one) to both the Meetup list and the Google Group mailing list. Use whatever works for you! If you're a mailing-list-only member, you may want to check out http://www.meetup.com/atx-osg/events/. You *do not* need to be a Meetup member to view this calendar. You can also subscribe to the calendar feed (links at the bottom of the page) without logging in. Even as a Meetup user I prefer using the calendar feed, so I highly recommend its usefulness. Adding it to Google calendar for event reminders & map links is super convenient.

Tech Nights

With our new monthly tech night schedule, we now have a lot more room to explore topics that we never got around to in 2014. Right now, you can check out that event calendar linked above to see a tentative schedule (based on what you guys have talked to me about wanting to see) through April 2015. As a tentative schedule, that can all be changed, so please let me know what you'd like to see, and when! And beyond that, please keep future requests & topic suggestions coming. If there's something you'd like to hear, any time during the year, just email me. I'll get it on the list.

Want to help?

Interested in giving a talk? Leading a hack night? Teaching a workshop? Writing content for our website? Getting your company to sponsor one of our events? Something else? Heck yes, we'd love to have you do that. You know what to do: let me know!!!

Again, end-of-year survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VR2XM7J -- thanks in advance for taking a minute to fill that out.

Thanks again, everyone, for making our group so much fun in 2014. I'm really looking forward to 2015 with you all!

Cheers,

Sara