Myrtle Beach Geekout

Here in the Myrtle Beach area (aka the Grand Strand), we’ve been trying to crystallize a geek community for years. This started with the Grand Strand bloggers get-togethers. The first one had four attendees – myself, Andre Pope, Chris Yale and Roger Yale. We had several more meetings like that over the next year past that time. Some of this was taken online with the group blog at the Grand Strand Blogroll, and a lot of the same community helped put together the CREATE South conference.

There’s a new iteration of this energy, and that’s the MB Geek Out. As evidence of how much farther this iteration has gone than the earlier similar passes, just look at how this came together. Paul Reynolds mentioned having some kind of a nerd gathering on his Twitter account. Someone else (Jerry Harrison) coined the term and a third person (Nicholas Mercer) registered the domain and set up the rocking MBGeekout.com website. As Paul told me at the meetup last week, “It wasn’t even that we have other people to delegate to: I didn’t have to delegate!”

I love this area and I’m glad to see us getting together and forming this community. Myrtle Beach is not known as a technological hot bed, so each of us tended to feel as if we were the only ones doing technical work, software development, etc in the area. The best part of community formation is letting each of us know we aren’t alone, which I consider a very fine reason to continue. Watch the MBgeekout.com site and/or follow @mbgeekout on Twitter for more information about when the next one is. Let the good times roll!