The Atlanta Dot Net Regular Guys won the election!
Brendon and I are pleased to announce that as of today, we are co-Vice Presidents of INETA heading up the Technology division. Our responsibilities include, but are not limited to, reforming the INETA website and turning it into a (more) useful portal for .NET User Groups around the country. We'll be building a team of dedicated technology workers to help us get this tremendous task done, so you might be hearing from us sometime soon - Brendon and I already have some people in mind for this! If you're interested in helping us with this herculean task, send an e-mail or comment on this blog entry.
On a personal note, let me say how much I'm looking forward to working even more closely with the INETA board. Brendon and I formed the Atlanta .NET Regular Guys group as a partnership committed to helping the developer community around us learn about the great resources that are the .NET User Groups. Now, by working together with INETA on a national level, we'll be able to expand our reach and get increasing numbers of people involved. Brendon and I have been working in Atlanta for two years at this, and we've been working directly with INETA for four months as members of the Community Activities committee. We've been working hard thus far and we look forward to working even harder.
I'd like to commend the other members of the INETA board on taking a chance with Brendon and myself. Brendon and I went to the board and told them that we were interested in the position of Vice President of Technology, but only if we could hold the position jointly. Barely six months out of a re-organization steering them away from co-chairs running committees, the group at INETA had to decide if they wanted to change directions organizationally yet again. Here's hoping everyone's made the right decision!
Finally, I'd like to talk about what this might mean in terms of our involvement at a local level. Brendon and I are anticipating a huge demand on our time as we become increasingly involved with the daily business of running a national and international organization. We're expecting that we'll have to reduce some of our committments to the local Atlanta user group community, but we hope that this doesn't mean we have to withdraw completely. We are firmly committed to our Atlanta Microsoft Professionals group, which we feel has given us the freedom to bring some highly structured and highly prepared professional level training to the community. We are also completely dedicated to maintaining both our User Group events calendar and our blog. Whether or not we will be able to remain leaders of the other groups in the area remains to be seen, but we will work individually with each UG leader to ensure a smooth transition to the next volunteer. We will continue to attend as many of the .NET training events and User Group meetings around town as we possibly can.
-- Matt Ranlett