Hi all:

Nice to meet you all.

A few of you may know me already though many of you don't. I've organized the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs Meetup Group for almost two years. In AWE we've worked to create a peer group of technical and entrepreneurial-minded people working in or interested in starting web-oriented business and we've been very successful as a Meetup group. Although we've been very successful with lots of motivated and exciting technical and business minds we have very few creative minds involved.

I myself am only marginally creative; I'm a recent amateur photographer but otherwise have mostly left-brain skills. On the other hand I greatly appreciate and recognize the need for great graphic design. But even though I'm not really a creative I have found I evidently have an inate skill for "community organizing" (and for those of you whom the term has a negative connotation, I hope you'll see past that. :)

So as I've been looking for ways to find and cross-polinate the various emergent communities in Atlanta to include graphic design I noticed this group was without an organizer and had not had meetings since this August. I thought it might be the perfect opportunity to combine my experience with organizing meetups to grow my own creative side and to serve this constituency with a goal of creating a thriving graphic design community and to create opportunities to cross polinate with the technical and business communities I'm involved in organizing.

That said, I need to get a feel for your group and I'm asking everyone in the group who is interested in the group to take both of the following polls so I can get a feel for how to best provide value to this group's members:

POLLS

What Parts of Town Work for You?
http://www.meetup.com/atlantagraphicdesign/polls/156770/

What Graphic Design Topics Interest You?
http://www.meetup.com/atlantagraphicdesign/polls/156777/

Thanks in advance. I look forward to getting your feedback on these polls or even hearing from you via email and I look forward to creating some great events and getting to know everyone in 2009.

-Mike Schinkel
[address removed]
Organizer