James Johnson started the Inland Empire .NET user group 5 years ago. I started attending the user group like 2, 2.5 years ago. I watch this user group growing and becoming better every day. Good speakers, good pizza, nice location (hey no parking fee!!!), very friendly people, and really devoting president James. We discussed about a lot of stuff with James to leverage the user group and do better stuff for the community. We had a 12 weeks Beginner's Asp.NET course, we recently completed it and i think it was a succesfull training. We opened our forums, i still dont understand why it didnt become popular to help people.
Thanx to James and our sponsor, we raffle tons of stuff in every meeting ( I attend 3 or 4 different user group in southern california, there is no other user group that raffles this much of stuff ).
One year ago James started a program which will reward the members who helps back the community, called MVM program; and as you can see from the right corner of this blog, i am this year's winner.I literally got tons of stuf , but one of the best thing is this proves i could give it back to the community. When i started coming the user group, i was more likely a consumer. Now after some time, this shows to me that, i start paying back to the user group which still i owe a lot (look at the prices dude!!! :P).
We have so many ideas to leverage our user group , just stay tuned, dont give up your support; support?!! what do i mean with support? Do you know you can help the group with:
- advertising the user group
- help tearing down the meeting room
- help setting up the room
- find a speaker
- speak yourself, give a presentation
- bring more people
- rsvp so we can now how much pizza we should buy
- check the forums, help to the people
... so many different ways to help, just ask for it.
I again thank to James and the user group.