There’s a new tech initiative gaining momentum in the Tri-Cities and tonight a local grass roots group supported by Jose Castillo and several other individuals presented their second Geek Dinner at the Pacific Grill in downtown Kingsport.
Using several collaborative software tools, the group is helping to connect a virtual consortium of extraordinary talent that includes web developers, bloggers, podcasters and other IT Professionals. The first meeting had a little over 20 and the one tonight was attended by more than 50 and some arriving from Asheville to support this new cause.
If you weren’t there, you missed a great networking opportunity and it will be intriguing to see what will surface from this new cast from all across the the region.
Tim Siglin is a corporate IT consultant and also works for the City of Kingsport to culture small business development. He shared a short presentation repeating some of the new gadgets from the recent MacWorld exposition and one of the podcasters with LockJaw presented their top-ten toys from the CES show from last year. The guys did a good job, but I appreciate the social time more than anything else. There was a whose-who of local digerrati in the room tonight.
I enjoyed conversations with Dave Sieg, one of my earliest inspirations and father of the Internet here in the Tri-Cities. His ideas in the mid-nineties gave birth to Tricon (first ISP in the area) and later a software developer – ZFX.
Nicole Sikori was in from Charlotte, NC. We lost her several years back, but she helped lay the groundwork for the Southwest Virginia Technology Council and was and still is a great supporter of any technical initiative ‘back home.’
I was probably a little too loud because I had time to talk to Ben Swihart. We worked together many years ago on the early development of the newspaper website in Kingsport and he and his girlfriend Cam Collins are producing extraordinary work from their association with Graphic Bliss.
Another distinctive creator/designer, Jeff Rainey was at the Geek Dinner tonight. He’s one of the volunteers who manages etricities.com and I’m impressed with his efforts and even more fond of Apple name tag he wore so proudly tonight.
Don Fenley from the Kingsport Times-News was having a glass of wine and sea bass tonight. He’s the new media editor and interested in this new movement and he was sitting with several new faces.
I was glad to introduce Debbie Boggs to Don and several other friends. She’s the new executive director for The Northeast Tennessee Technology Council and she seemed very envious of a new powerbook that one of the nurse bloggers was zooming around on with wi-fi access at the Grill.
There were lots of other new acquaintances tonight and the networking and unbridled geek-speak was fun, but how does a group like this pool their influence and talent to culture a strong tech initiative here in the Tri-Cities?
I’m also interested how a group like this could ignite a collaboration of passionate people to improve the lifestyle of our East Tennessee home? That will be an interesting question to consider as this effort moves forward. All the right ingredients are on the table – and maybe their new effort to put together a leadership clan will help refine the mission.
Always good to get out with the geeks though. Oh one more thing – there were no pocket protectors tonight.