I'm in VA (Fairfax) and would be interested to participate probably not tomorrow as I'm busy. But I honestly don't feel like driving just for happy hour, I'm very social but I'd rather come and discuss/discover a topic. I'll be happy to present something around security (I work in security research in different DARPA project). I believe this would create connection based on technical interest rather than social affinity.
When I scrolled through the list of the ~40 marked as attending, I thought about how useless that list was.
I wonder when Meetup is going to start suggesting events based on the people who are going. I can imagine they have a massive amount of data, with a huge graph of connections behind it. I can recall when joining it sucked about 98,000 parameters from my Facebook profile into it.
It's trivial to show me things I might enjoy based on a few tags, like, "oh you like ruby so you might like this hackathon on friday" I'd love it if they put that data they've got on me to use, however, and started to suggest things like "hey it looks like you and about 15 people attending this nuclear fusion discussion would really get along, want to learn more??"
I think the value of meetup's in general is the people that go and the social interaction, not necessarily the topic at hand. I'd even go to a web programming with QBASIC meetup (get it, goto, haha) if I knew that there were some cool people there that I might want to talk to.
On second thought, a QBASIC web programming meetup would be a good time no matter what.
Looks great -- I'll try to make it, even though there are a few other events going on that day. On that note, folks that are interested in networking and interacting with other techies in the scene should also check out the DC TechBreakfast (http://www.meetup.com/techbreakfast). A lot of local companies show off what their doing in a non-pitch style event. It's been going on now for about a year, but just came to DC a few months ago. They have over 1300 folks on the meetup and 120 or so come to the DC one, and it's not completely software focused.
And if you're north of the beltway, you might find the Baltimore Tech Breakfast to be slightly closer to you (as it is me) -- next meeting is tomorrow:
Yup, run by the same folks - TechBreakfast is in three cities (so far) - DC, Columbia (MD), and Baltimore. They are all once a month. Baltimore gets between 200-240 people, Columbia between 100-150 and DC around 150.
Is this a pretty software-oriented group? If there are people interested in hardware (saw a recent post here suggesting that YC is) I'd attend. Code is fun but not my forte, and knowing this area I would be the only HW guy around, surrounded by a sea of analysts.
I'm in VA (Fairfax) and would be interested to participate probably not tomorrow as I'm busy. But I honestly don't feel like driving just for happy hour, I'm very social but I'd rather come and discuss/discover a topic. I'll be happy to present something around security (I work in security research in different DARPA project). I believe this would create connection based on technical interest rather than social affinity.