We have way too many irons in the fire.
There’s the IT conference. A first draft of a book is heading to an editor so that we can get a professional opinion regarding the suck level of our writing abilities. There’s our upcoming Pink Slip Party and other events (we’re actually booked out through the end of the year now…crazy…) to be handled. The always present 10 to 15 blog entries sitting around in draft that keep getting revisited. 87 or so random ideas that keep getting brought up, sound interesting, and then put on a shelf until we have time. Running off to MEDC’s Shifting Gears or other events to speak…
Oh, and we’re all married, have kids and day jobs, and all of the above is done in what we laughingly call “our free time”.
That’s no excuse though. We have to start pulling a few of those irons out, ready or not, because if we don’t they’re going to melt…
…and if we learned nothing else from Terminator 2, it’s that liquid metal is bad news.
The other thing I’ve learned is that we can’t keep our cards so damned close to the vest. We have to be a little more open and clear with our intentions and our requests…because otherwise it just leads to confusion and having to answer the same questions multiple times. And you all know how much I love doing that.
So let’s lay a few of those cards out on the table…and then if you’re interested in coming to play with us on some of them, we’d certainly love the help.
IT In The D: www.ITinTheD.com
We’ve had this domain sitting around registered for more than a year now, but completely idle. In fact, until recently it was pointed here as an alias for this site. Originally, it was the name we were going to use for our IT Conference…but then we decided that there were other, perhaps better options. But as I mentioned in this post the other day, I still went out and bought the domains and we incorporated them into our overall body of work. Over the past six months, we’ve been kicking around starting up a site that would be focused on news and information that might be of interest to those in the IT community here in metro Detroit. But none of three of us ever had the time to get it started.
Then I stumbled across something that, well, basically does a lot of what we were looking to do all along – the Detroit Nerd Daily, a paper.li aggregator of news and information from around the web. Sweet!
So, we’re kicking the tires to figure out how we’re going to move this forward, but in the meantime I’ve taken the liberty of pointing www.ITinTheD.com over to Kevin’s corner of the world so that you can check out what he’s got going on. Make sure you say “hi”.
Network Michigan: www.NetworkMichigan.org
ITintheD.com will always be focused on the Information Technology community here in metro Detroit. That’s it. It’s never going to be anything other than that…because that’s all we want it to ever be.
But we keep getting requests to do what we do for ourselves for other industries. Whether it’s legal, or medical, or marketing, or some other professional area that’s out there…we get asked, because people for some reason seem to think we know what we’re doing. And not even just other industries…we get asked by IT folks around the state “When are you coming to Grand Rapids?”, “when are you coming to Lansing?”, “What about…”, “How about…” on a pretty regular basis.
We want to help…but it won’t…can’t…be as ITintheD.com.
And we want to help get the word out about other events, and perhaps even start to build a clearinghouse of attendee reviews, comments, a forum for discussions…
…but that can’t really be as ITintheD.com either.
So we’re getting Network Michigan off the ground. It’s still very ugly, and very much in a “beta” stage at best…but it’s time to start getting that out there and opened up a bit. Want to help with it? Want a contributor ID so that you can get your own events popped into the calendar and out there? Drop us a note and let’s chat: http://www.ITinTheD.com/contact/
Those are the big two. There’s another “next step” here in the mix beyond Network Michigan because of requests we’ve gotten from folks in various cities around the country…but we’re not even close to being ready to dive into that one yet.
Yet.
But we shall get there, won’t we Rupert?
Oh yes, we shall…
In the meantime, we’ll keep playing it by ear and hope we find a few of you that want to dive in with us and help things grow.