Tomorrow I will give a talk about "C# 6" in just like 30 minutes. It will be a practical hands-on, where I'm going to present all the little new details that have been added to the C# programming language. Afterwards I will (live and on-stage) renew an existing code-base by applying the features where it makes sense. This talk should be informative and inspirational. It will also be a nice introduction to what is about to follow.
After the talk we will start a discussion about the future of the .NET usergroup Regensburg. This usergroup has been successful from the beginning, but recently it started stagnating. There are multiple (known or assumed) reasons for this. The fact that I will give my 3rd talk in 5 months is reason enough to change something.
The first thing to discuss is the website. The old one was functional and quite alright for a long time, but it seems that the update frequency and the potential to attract new visitors has decreased drastically recently. Therefore I made a new one. The discussion will be about potential improvements on the webpage, what is still missing, and how to make it more popular.
The webpage is hosted on GitHub, which makes updates and future talks really transparent. The new openness should help to attract new visitors. We want to be very open about what the usergroup stands for, who is our audience, and what is discussed there. The GitHub organization contains a repository with the website that accepts pull requests, uses issues (also for announcements), and contains all the code. Another repository stores all the available downloads in a very well organized manner. Each talk with downloads has its own branch.
Finally we want to attract more visitors with novel events, such as a (small, but elegant) conference. This needs to be discussed. If we can't find enough interested people in the usergroup, it does not make sense to organize such an event. Also we need a theme, a time-frame, and location.
There are many changes upon us and I invite everyone from Regensburg to join us for these discussions tomorrow at 6pm in the IT-Speicher (same location as usual).