Refresh DC October meeting wrap-up

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I’m blockquoting myself, from the Refresh DC newsletter that’ll be going out tomorrow morning:

I’m going to eschew the typical third-person delivery for a moment because I feel it necessary that everyone knows this is coming from me.

I want to first thank Alex and Joshua for delivering an outstanding presentation. It touched on so many important aspects of site and community development on the web. Excellent job to you both and best of luck with getting on the bill at SXSW.

Second, a huge thanks to everyone who made it out to the meeting this month. We counted in the neighborhood of 50 people which easily makes October’s meeting the most attended. From what I heard, a few folks traveled from as far away as Baltimore, which, to me, is incredible.

Regardless of distance traveled, I hope everyone who attended (particularly you first-timers) enjoyed the presentation and the post-meeting festivities (apologies again for not being able to partake). I’d also like to apologize for not meeting all of you new folks (there were just too many of you!). My hope is you got a good sense of what Refresh DC is about and will be attending future meetings.

At the risk of being long-winded (too late), I’ll close with another ‘thank you’ to everyone for helping me (and us) grow this little community into a large community of passionate individuals. You have all helped make Refresh DC a success in a few short months.

So thank you, and I’ll see you all at the next meeting!

- Jason Garber, Refresh DC facilitator guy

When I started up Refresh DC back in February, I expected maybe a handful of people would show up to the meetings. I never would’ve guessed that in eight months, we’d be pushing 50 people. I really believe the content of the presentation had a lot to do with it. I heard from at least one person who said they’d not attended previous meetings because of the overly-technical nature of the presentations. That makes sense and I think we can use feedback like that to steer the direction of conversation in one way or the other.

Conversely, you’re not going to be all things to all people at all times. One of my goals for Refresh DC is to provide a great variety of content to passionate individuals. I’d say we’re definitely achieving that. I’d be interested in hearing more feedback from everyone to see what attendees are interested in learning about.

I’d write more, but I’m still exhausted from moving and unpacking. Oi, what a pain!