Report: Meetup #4 - Growth, Growth, Growth

This was Silicon Halton's first meetup north of old Hwy #5 (Dundas).  Ned Devine's, located on the old southern most end of Milton, turned out to be a great location and they provided a great room that met our needs.

The turn out at Milton was ~50% larger than our inaugural event in Oakville and first event Burlington (Meetup #2).  It's important to note February 16th was also the first Olympic Canadian women's hockey game (they won!).This reinforced the want for a strong ground-swell hi tech organization in the area.  

During this meeting, Rick Stomphorst presented a chart showing the various membership growth of Silicon Halton to-date. We're noticing a trend ; )

New Logo

We announced the new Silicon Halton logo.  The logo contains the key tenets of the Silicon Halton brand, namely Technology, Community, and Growth.  Silicon Halton member Angelica Tan described the new logo best of all, "...the idea of the tree representing growth and different branches..".  We'll grow, you'll grow, and we'll invariably branch out. 

Special thanks to Sekey & Enrico of www.JellyBeanSolutions.comfor dreaming up this cool logo.  They based it on the feedback received from Meetup 3 in Oakville.  Input makes a difference.

Community

As Community is one of our founding pillars, Helen Hassard of Halton Industry Education Council briefly presented their immediate needs for their inagural Men as Career Coaches event, namely, men, and for the future Women as Career Coaches (again, women). Both events require adult role models who are willing to share their career pathways, encourage positive self-esteem and promote the goals and aspirations of youth. Helen did an admirable job at describing the event (which we won't re-describe here) and at time of this writing, members volunteered their time for the MACC evening event. (post meetup note: the MACC event saw ~180 men volunteer their time, some from Silicon Halton!)

Another person from the community, and Silicon Halton member, EC Drury H.S. teacher Mike Druiven, gave a call-to-action to help his Robotics club. The ECD Robotics club needed a laundry list of items to enable it to complete in the Halton Skills Competition:Robotics.  More info can be found here.  Mike's passion was so strong, that one of our members donated $100 buckaroo's on behalf of Silicon Halton.

Workshop

Our objectives for this Meetup 4 was to further solicit members for ideas on certain topics, as if Silicon Halton is to become successful, it has to become what the members want.  We had 4 questions this month, each addressed in 4 different concurrent breakout sessions.  This was a change from the previous strategy of all collectively (in pods) working on the same topic.  This idea allowed members to gravitate towards the topic they felt they could add the most value, and/or move between topics.  Clever eh?  The questions Chris and Rick were looking for input are:

• Presentation topics & format
• Un-Conference presentation topic ideas
• Recent Sucesses
• www.siliconhalton.com "Member Profiles content"
  
  

The results were published in the Silicon Halton LinkedIn group discussion item Meetup 4 Feedback. Pictures of the event can be found here, couresty of Silicon Halton member Ryan Gamble.

Next Event

As is now becoming customary, we announced the date & location for the subsequent meetup, Meetup #5, to be held on Tuesday March 23 at 7pm at Philthy McNastys in Burlington.   We also had Meetup 5 event flyers available to hand out. A special shout out to Nancy Forsyth at The UPS Store 342 (1500 Upper Middle Rd. W. Oakville) for printing the colour flyers at n/c to us.  Nancy has been very supportive of our community and we greatly appreciate that. Thanks Nancy. Event Date: February 16th, 2010 Location: Ned Devine's, Milton Special thanks to:  Ned Devines's for the venue and again, Nancy Forsyth @ The UPS Store 342.