GuruStop.NET

Name Change: #EgyGeeks

Our first meeting on Friday, or technically the first hours of Saturday (starting 12 AM), we found technical difficulties in establishing the conversation on Skype, with around 25 attendees, and the need to share desktop view with the entire group, for the first part of the gathering (Ayman’s session).

That’s why we decided we may have rushed it by including the word “Skype” in the name. I don’t know why we needed a name and all that anyway, because the idea is simply some friends who have common interests (all do .NET related stuff) that meet together online weekly talking about their common interests.

Methods of Communication

For twitter, since this gathering used another tool “webex” for conferencing, and we haven’t determined yet how we’ll manage the next gathering, we changed the twitter hash tag to just “#EgyGeeks”.

Also, we created a Google group to enable us to email everybody when we settle on how the next gathering will be. The group has the same name”EgyGeeks”

Facebook?

We agreed we won’t focus on any other online activity like facebook group etc.. until we settle one or two more gatherings. However, some friends already created a couple of facebook pages for it, which is welcome effort from their side anyway, except that one of the pages is called the “official page” (no official page yet) and the other page has me, Ayman and Ramy admins for it, asking us to focus on that page or this. This reminds me with classic Arab forums efforts. Arab guys, you know what I mean!

Why .NET ? Why .NET Only ?

#EgyGeeks is NOT about specifically .NET!

When we first met, we were all .NET developers. We decided we want to meet talking about our common interests. And asked all friends who have similar interests to join us as well.

But, what are those interests? If you are in .NET world, you care about many things, .NET is only one. you probably also care about SQL Server, Oracle maybe, Agile methodologies, integrating your work with graphic/web designer and also QA/QC/testing/process people. So, those all are candidates for upcoming talks. if you notice, the first session we had was about “SharePoint No Code Solutions”. So, it’s around what typical .NET related people would think is important.

This is not new by the way. this is what dotNETwork offline user group for example is about. It’s just we’re doing it online!

I want You To Talk About “X Y Z”

Now that you know what we are about, you are likely to know whether your topic may interest the most guys or not. You can send a suggestion to the Google Group for specific topic and we’ll have a vote on it.

If you have a totally unrelated topic, you can get friends who care about it and start something. This does not mean we’re selfish or we don’t welcome contributions. But of course talking about Linux or such won’t interest most of the people.

If you want to start that, we’ll help you based on our small experience yet with this group, seriously.

How Can I Choose The Next Topic?

Since the topics belong to the people, this is what happened in first gathering:

Poll For Next Gathering Topic: Pre-Organized Session And Open Talk Time

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Q7CDLWC

You just go check the poll and tell us what topic you want. You can choose from the list or write your own suggestion.

Who is Organizing This?

For now me, Ramy Mahrous, Ayman El Hattab,(sharePoint MVP) and also some small helping network containing Shady Naguib and Yasser Makram (Silverligth MVP). Some of the network were there from the first unplanned gathering also and are very passionate about it like Mohamed Gamal and Doha El Sayed, Emad Mokhtar.