CinARC and Open Spaces

Two great nights of conversation.  We had about 20 people at the CinARC meeting this last Tuesday.  Three guys came all the way from Indianapolis to attend!  That’s great!  Shane, Dean and Sasha all heard about the event via Twitter and decided to brave some fairly nasty weather to attend.

The fish bowl meeting format at CinARC is still working out for us.  I think we will rotate the moderator role or have special guests be moderators so that they don’t have to leave the table. We went through three topics on Tuesday night but there were several more thrown up on the board to hit next time.  If you have an architecture topic you’d like to talk about then head out to next month’s meeting on Tuesday, August 12th and propose it.

One thing I’m going to try to remember to do next month is right before the pizza break ask if anyone has a specific architecture issue they’d like to talk about.  Then people that are interested in helping can get together during pizza to go over it.  This keeps us out of trying to solve one person’s problem, but also provides for a way to get your specific issues addressed.

The Open Spaces had about 11 people show.  I actually had no expectations on attendance.  I knew via Twitter or the night before that at least five of us would be there.  Again, we hit on about three different topics and the group was small enough that we decided to stay together instead of breaking apart.  Everyone there provided input into the conversation and we definitely will be throwing more Open Spaces events together in the future.