A geek meet in Northern Sweden

Monday, 27 August 2007

Living in Northern Sweden has it's limitations. The limitations for an Englishman trying to work for himself but toying with the idea of chopping wood or building ice sculptures, is meeting people in the same line of work.

It's slowly getting better, or at least I've opened a door or two, thanks to someone over at North Kingdom, but I need more.

So, while surfing the net today, I stumbled across Robert's Talk, the blog for Robert Nyman, a developer down in Stockholm.

Robert started something called Geek Meet which is a regular meeting of 'web developers and other people interested in the web scene'.

The only problems with the meeting are the location and the fact that I think there are enough of us in the North who might be interested in attending. Because of these two small but fairly significant problems, I thought we'd try and arrange our own meeting.

So, seeing as I've not heard of anything like this up here I emailed Robert (I'll also invite him up if this takes off) to ask for some help in getting the word out that we might have one in the North.

So here we are. The general guidelines are:
- It should be free to attend
- It should be independent, i.e. no company will own the event or set up the rules
- Sponsorship from companies is allowed, but shouldn’t interfere with the above guideline
- Everyone should be treated equal, and technical talks should be in a constructive manner

I'm thinking of setting the first meeting up in either Skellefteå or Umeå (it depends on where the most interest is) and for sometime in October. The topic for the first meeting will be open source but there will also be a section of time towards the end dedicated to 'the future meeting of the geeks in Northern Sweden'.

So, if you're interested, all I'm asking is you register your interest by leaving a comment below with your preferred location. Your email address won't be published but I'll be able to see it and will need it.

If you have any suggestions, would maybe like to sponsor the first event or just want me to contact you, ask me in the comment form below too.