I’m happy to say that the first Refresh Cleveland gathering was a success. We met up for dinner and beers at the Winking Lizard in Lakewood, and topics of conversation included:

• We have a lot of talented folks in this town. Why are they not speaking to each other?
• The Cleveland Web Standards Association is a Good Thing. Go. Attend. Support.
• Cleveland Day of .NET and the Worthiness of Rails.
• The pitfalls of freelancing.
• General frustration with the tech-lag at agencies in town. Anyone just discovering that RSS is a Good Idea really needs to get out more.
• Never let marketers drive design or development decisions.
• Cleveland Web Association lunches were discussed. Snarky blog post to follow.
• Oregon Trail
• The keys to a good presentation.

I’d like to thank the following folks for coming out to share their experiences (and some fine, fine boneless wings):

• Bridget Stewart
• Brad Dielman
• Brad Colbow
• Kris Johnson
• Adam Hutcheson
• Joe Fiorini

We have some big plans coming up…a Barcamp over the summer (probably in cooperation with the CWSA), more gathers, and hosting some panel discussions. If you’d like to be in the loop, please subscribe to the Refresh Cleveland mailing list.

And, as promised, here is the the excellent presentation video I brought up at dinner. Watch to the end. It’s worth it:

Here are the presentation slides, for the curious.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 8:32 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.