Meeting June 22, 2006

(This page is publically editable, so please add your $0.02!)

About 12 people showed up to our first meeting. Yay! Several more contacted me (Chuck) at the last minute saying that they couldn’t make it this time, but would show up next time.

We started somewhat awkwardly by going around to introduce ourselves, then chatting about what we want out of these meetings. Rather than having structured presentations, it seemed like the general consensus was that people wanted a space where they could have a single-group free-form discussion, but perhaps seeded with a particular topic. Things got more interesting during the second hour when we just started talking. The conversation naturally flowed between topics like:

• How to structure your company: S-corp vs. LLC
• What are the steps to starting an LLC?
  • Refer to the NoLo books
  • Setting up an operating agreement
• What goes into a provisional patent? Are patents worth it?
• Pros/cons of particular SW platform (aka why/when go Microsoft)
• Databases
  • Use of geometric proximity lookup (e.g. for mapping software)
  • When to use SQL Server, Postgres
  • Search implementations

We agreed to have our next meeting in the 2-week timeframe.

• Set up forum space on this wiki (DONE)
• Schedule next meeting
• Tell people when this meeting is
• Set up an email list (nb. I might postpone getting an actual MailMan list until July 8th, when I will drop this site onto a new server)