pimg src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/uploads/midwestmeetup1_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0;" alt="image" width="300" height="224" / br / /ph6Jill Swick, Koby Oz and Rich Lyons get the crowd going at the first Midwest Magento Meetup/h6p/br /p p A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough, along with our awesome a href="http://twitter.com/jillswick"Jill Swick/a to attend the first a href="http://www.meetup.com/The-Midwest-Magento-Meetup/"Magento Midwest Meetup/a hosted at a href="http://www.technexus.org/"TechNexus/a by Magento Enterprise Partners a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/view/192/lyons-consulting-group"Lyons Consulting Group/a.nbsp; We had a great showing of about 40 people made up of Magento community members, developers and merchants as well as reps from a number of our partners including a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/view/171/acquity-group"Acquity/a, a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/view/216/plum-tree-group"Plum Tree Group/a and a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/partners/view/132/zeon-solutions"Zeon/a. /p p img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/uploads/midwestmeetup2_thumb.jpg" style="border: 0;" alt="image" width="300" height="225" / br / /ph6Rich Lyons talking to the group about the Meetup group and goals for participation/h6p/br /p p The Meetup started with Rich Lyons presenting a little bit on the group and stating that the group#8217;s purpose is to bring together like minded people from the Magento community and server as a sort of Magento #8220;users group#8221; for Magento developers, users, partners and anyone who is generally interested.nbsp; If you#8217;re interested in joining the group, attending and/or speaking please make sure to check out the a href="http://www.meetup.com/The-Midwest-Magento-Meetup/"Magento Midwest Meetup/a group page.nbsp; There are already 73 members in the group! /p p After Rich, I took the stage, and along with periodic help from Jill, gave a presentation about the Magento community and how its grown over the last year, how large the community is, how people are helping each other every day and some upcoming things we are working on with the community, for the community.nbsp; I mentioned things like the changes to the forums some of you might have already realized, which will be covered in the very next post, the a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-developers-paradise/"Magento Developers Paradise/a, some other US based events that we are planning, a new community news aggregator we are trying to set up and some other cool things which you#8217;ll be hearing about real soon too.nbsp; I also spoke a bit on how anyone can become a a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/tomorrow-today/"Magento Contributor/a and the different areas of the project which you could contribute to, like a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/bug-tracking"Bugs/a, The a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/"Magento Wiki/a and of course the a href="http://groups.google.com/group/magento-devel"magento-devel/a Google Group for submitting code and patches for inclusion into the Magento tree.nbsp; I then took some question from the audience and we wrapped up with everyone enjoying what was left of the food and drinks that were left from the start of the program while people talked and got to know each other better and forged bonds, friendships and business relationships that we hope will continue and continue to strengthen the community. /p p The next Magento Midwest Meetup will take place on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 6pm and we are looking to have another great turnout.nbsp; If you#8217;re interested in attending, speaking and/or sponsoring the group, please visit the a href="http://www.meetup.com/The-Midwest-Magento-Meetup/"Magento Midwest Meetup/a group page to sign up and email a href="http://www.meetup.com/The-Midwest-Magento-Meetup/suggestion/"Heather Swanson/a who is helping to organize the meetings. /p p We#8217;re also looking for regional organizers/sponsors for other Meetups across the US.nbsp; If you live in area with like minded Magento people, and would like to help host a Magento Meetup event and have us come to your town, please leave some love in the comments below and/or email me at to start talking and get the ball rolling. I look forward to meeting you there. /p p Koby img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/images/smileys/smile.gif" width="19" height="19" alt="smile" style="border:0;padding:0;" / /pbr /hr style="border:none; background:#bbb; height:1px; overflow:hidden;"/table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0"trtd valign="top" width="90" align="left"a href="http://twitter.com/magento"img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/magento_on_twitter.png" //a/tdtd valign="top" width="220" style="padding:0;"strongfont size="-2"FROM THE MAGENTO TWITTER FEED/font/strong/spanpa href="http://twitter.com/magento/statuses/10880825114"Strategic eCommerce Part II: Total eCommerce Execution - http://eepurl.com/kKn3/a/ppa href="http://twitter.com/magento"strongfont size="-2"Follow Magento on Twitter ?/font/strong/a/p/tdtdimg src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/clear.gif" width="10px" /img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/feed_separator.png" //tdtd valign="top" width="90" align="left"a href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"img src="http://www.magentocommerce.com/img/magento_ebook.png" //a/tdtd valign="top" width="220" style="padding:0;"strongfont size="-2"NOW AVAILABLE/font/strongpa href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"The Official Magento User Guide by Varien is here!/a/ppa href="http://www.magentocommerce.com/support/magento-user-guide-book"strongfont size="-2"Get your eBook today ?/font/strong/a/p/td/tr/tablediv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=jN0WdWAOpeg:ICkIB4vyaQ0:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=jN0WdWAOpeg:ICkIB4vyaQ0:7Q72WNTAKBA"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?d=7Q72WNTAKBA" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?a=jN0WdWAOpeg:ICkIB4vyaQ0:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/magento?i=jN0WdWAOpeg:ICkIB4vyaQ0:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/magento/~4/jN0WdWAOpeg" height="1" width="1"/

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