New York City participates in Global CiviDay Jan 23, 2013

We had a great turn out in New York City despite the bitter cold weather here.

We sent out a midday reminder - luring our registered participants with the promise of NYC-steam heat, food and drink. We had a record turn out of  close to 30 people who were a mix of end users, implementors, developers. We focused on introductions, tuned into Dave and Lobo's 'What's new in CiviCRM 4.3' presentation, peppered them with questions, and then talked as a group about what we could do in 2013 to build our community. We are leaning towards alternating meet-ups with co-working days every other month. We see a 'challenges and solutions' theme emerging...

It was agreed that we could really use a local user group on civicrm.org in order to facilitate organizing our meetings. We'd prefer to use this in combination with CiviMail and CiviEvents registration (which we're already using) than MeetUp in the spirit of "eating our own dog food" (an expression I first heard from Lobo years ago). Though we are open to using MeetUp and other forums (Drupal.org, Wordpress.org and Joomla.org) to market to a diverse user base.

We'll be putting out a schedule of future community events in NYC later this month.