I attended the first PDX 11 Knowledge Network Meeting convened by Warren Harrison at the end of last year. Specifically, I attended by Skype and found the experience was less than optimal: hard to hear, and the call got put on perma-hold about 30 minutes into the meeting. To his credit, Warren did ask all of us Skype attendees for feedback and mine was that I’d make it a point to attend in person next time.

You can find the minutes from the Knowledge Network meeting in the group’s mailing list archive. If you’re at all interested in helping to support user groups with finding meeting space and other types of logistics, please join the mailing list and start attending the group’s meetings. Warren’s asked the group to start brainstorming about what we’d like to see in our ideal user group meetup space, and you can start contributing to that discussion.

I didn’t get the opportunity to attend yesterday’s meeting of the PDX 11 Financing working group, but I have a few friends that were there and are planning to blog. I’ll post a link in the comments when there’s a write up to share.

I don’t see a lot of traffic on the PDX 11 mailing lists and I’m wondering if it’s a matter of raising awareness or if they’re not the best tool for the community to use. I consistently assume everyone is familiar with using mailing lists to organize groups, meetings and workflows, but obviously that’s not the case. On the other hand, if you’re just wondering how to engage, step up and introduce yourself. I’m sure the groups will be happy to have your input. Right now, the PDX 11 site is labor of love by Selena Deckelmann and hosted by the OSU Open Source Lab, so if it needs to grow and evolve, we’ll also need to figure out where the resources to do that will come from and figure out which tools will work best. I’m hoping the Portland Development Commission will provide some leadership and financing for this infrastructure.

Next up, the Mentoring working group. Details still TBD.