Every month, the NetSquared Community comes together offline at NetSquared Local events around the world to mix, swap stories and ideas, build new relationships, and collaborate to help the local community. Increasingly, these groups have been sharing their events around the globe via streaming of audio and/or video. After seeing how successful these events have been, we’ve created a Meetup page to make it easier for you to learn about and attend these virtual events.

For our September MeetUp, we are thrilled to have longtime online community expert, Randall Farmer, as our guest speaker. We'll also be joined by Bill Johnston, Head of Global Community at Dell, who will be facilitating the event.

Randy will be speaking about managing reputation systems in online communities. His talk will lead into an informal discussion moderated by Bill. Come join us for an evening of online community strategy and in-person networking with fellow online community enthusiasts.

There are over 70 NetSquared groups around the world that meet to network and learn about using the web and other innovative technologies to make social change happen. Each one of these groups is volunteer run and community driven, and each one is totally unique and at the mercy of the interests, cultures and expertises of the group members.

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The July Net2Camb event was led by Will Hall, a PHP web developer and open source enthusiast. He discussed the options, benefits, and risks associated with using open source content management systems for SMEs, charities and NGOs.

Will has kindly written a wrap-up of the event to share with you, and included his presentation slides for your reference:

Today we hosted our second NetTuesday event in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne and decided to do things a little differently. I spread some large sheets of scrap paper out on the table and bunched together some textas and crayons in a jar. The atmosphere was informal, and everyone was encouraged to participate whilst sipping lattes and munching on muffins, although I ended up visually facilitating the session (people are afraid that they can't draw!) based on the discussion. The idea was to capture some ideas, experiences and general conversation about ways people are making a difference.