Next Meetup

[Lakshan Perera]

Hi All,

I think its high time for us to decide on the first meetup for this year. We started LK Ruby User Group in high spirits and should not let that spirit to fade away.
Since we haven't meet yet for this year, I think we should break away from our traditional meetup day (which is the last Wednesday of a month). I hope most your schedules are getting back to normal, so how about meeting within the coming week or next?

Let's decide on a comfortable day for all. We could meet up as usual @ 5.00pm in Ridgecrest (Sameera said there's no problem in giving us the location for meetup - which is really great). Please give your ideas on the date.

For the meetup there are 2 slots open for presentations by volunteers. So if you got anything interesting you'd like to share (no need to be strictly related Ruby or Rails, but something all could benefit) please reply to this with your presentation idea.

Also, lets try to set a common topic for each meet up and have a discussion (though it happens naturally like in previous meetups). So give your suggestions on this one as well.

Hope to see you all soon in the meetup and share the fun & knowledge!

Happy Hacking!

--
LP

[Sanath Fernando]

Guys,

I will second Lakshan's thoughts.  We are in the danger period here... we all had a lot of enthusiasm in starting this group, and now we are back to our normal busy schedules.  With the startup excitement now behind us, it's easy to keep postponing the meetings, until they stop happening at all.

This week is out given the holiday tomorrow (Thurs) and I don't think Friday (any Friday) is a good day to meet.  Let's try our best to have the meeting next week (not the week after). 

We should take some time at the meeting to plan out the year and also come up with some strategic goals.  If we can come up with the calendar for the year... meetings are on these days and then try to slot in the speakers for at least 3 months, we address the continuity issue.

I forwarded a global Ruby user group site to Sameera.  We should be looking into liaising with global groups as well. 

Long term, in order to make sure that this group continues to thrive, we need to look at what the participants get out of the meeting.  This is basic human nature.  We do the things that benefit us and the other stuff drops by the wayside.  My suggestion here is that the presentations, rather than being ad-hoc, have a planned progression, getting more and more advanced.  We can archive past presentations to allow newcomers to get up to speed.

Regards,
Sanath

[Gaveen Prabhasara]

Hi,

First let me thank Sanath for a set of excellent suggestions. We all were thrilled
by the early enthusiasm and success of the RUG. Now after the initial rush this
is obviously the time to get organized and look towards the future.

As I've always kept, I think the suggestions to plot out the year and have a
strategic plan for the group a great idea. Not only it's great, it's also probably the
best for us at this stage.

So far we seem to have a rough consensus on the group name and the domain
name. So let's keep things going from there onward. Let's have a meetup and
discuss a little strategic plan. Get volunteers to get things done.

So who's in for a next week meetup? Just pick a time and make it happen.

Cheers,
Gaveen

[Aslam Najeemdeen]

Hello folks,
i really appreciate previous 3 replys. Yes. We should move ahead with
the same sprite that we had in last year.
Next week completely fine for me and let's confirm the date that
everyone comfortable with.
Regarding the domain name, i'll able to setup everything by this week.
Had some issues with my credit card last few days.

See you all very soon.

--
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N.Mohamed Aslam
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[Lakshan Perera]

How about next Wednesday (10th) for meetup?

[sameera gayan]

HI,

Sorry for the late reply, Yeah.. As Sanath said  Lets plan our year ahead so that it will be more organize. Thank you all for the great support , specially Sanath for giving us the venue.

I have added our user group to global ruby user groups (from the link that sanath sent..) http://www.rubyusergroups.org/

And sanath has the domain www.rubylk.com and he is willing to our user group. 

Looking forward to great year, and lets keep the spirit up :D

cheers,

sameera   

[Lakshan Perera]

Hi All,

Sorry to bother you all again from your busy schedules. But hope you will give a second for this mail. We are already in to the mid of this week, I'm wondering whether there's a possibility of having a meetup this week?

Do you think its still not the high-time to have a physical knowledge sharing meetup? If so I think its perfectly alright and we should not waste time each others time, if we cannot see everyone getting a substantial input from it.

If that's the case can we have a virtual meetup (via IRC or GTalk) to do some brainstorming and strategic planning on how we should move this group forward. What do you think?

As I know there are lot of requests from students (in Universities and schools) on how to learn Ruby. We know these languages or programming techniques would not be available on a formal academic course any time soon. So only through this kind of a movement students can get exposed to this knowledge. Organization leaders here, would know how difficult today it's to find and train new developers with right passion and knowledge to adapt to this culture.

Also, most of us know how rapidly these technologies do evolve and how difficult it's to keep up with all those trends. At least, a monthly gathering of this sort would help us to refresh our knowledge.

In my opinion, there are lot we can do and need to do a lot as Lanka Ruby User Group. But we need to have a plan and a proper schedule on how we do these stuff. For that we need to have the inputs from all the members.

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,
Lakshan

[Aslam Najeemdeen]

Hello folks,

Yes. I agree with Lakshan. I really like to have the physical meetup rather than virtual. But if all are busy we can have a virtual brainstroming session.

Anyhow we should not allow to go down our interest and spirit.

--

[Shamika Ariyawansa]

Hi
Lakshan you made a great point, but i still believe that we can have a physical meet-up as an initiation for this year. Since sameera is out of the country this week, we'll plan for the next meetup on wednesday(17th). If that is also not possible with our busy schedule then we obviously should go for other alternatives....

Regards,
Shamika

[Gaveen Prabhasara]

Hi All,

I agree with what's already been told. And I believe a meetup (a real one) is
due to get things going. So instead of furthering our discussion, I'm voting
for Shamikas suggestion for the date (17th Feb) and time 5-ish. Let's do it.
So,

+1 for 17 Feb meetup.

Additionally, the person who sent me the mail looking for a Ruby/RoR dev
(which I had already forwarded to the group before), Prabode of Venturit has
offered to sponsor a meetup in March. We can talk about it in this months
meetup, I believe.

--
Gav

[Aslam Najeemdeen]

+1 for 17 Feb meetup.