Last month I took a trip to Portland, OR. I fell in love with the city, the people and the energy. I met some cool people.  I saw a great deal of collaboration and people actively engaged in the community around them. One of the groups was a group of bloggers that met to help each other with their blogs. They met weekly in a cool local bar/restaurant (with wifi), and the group was called Beer and Blog.

Smart people energetically discussing how to use technology and use it better.  A fun group with a great spirit. They were quite friendly to me, the chick from the Midwest, and I also saw again how this type of open exchange of ideas and technical knowledge in a social setting is useful to build collaboration.

When I got back to St. Louis I reached out to a lot of my blogger friends, and friends of other bloggers and just folks who blog that I don’t know and asked if there was interest to make something like this happen here. There was. I also heard a desire for a very broad spectrum of folks to be involved, not just tech people. Folks got excited about a chance to meet other bloggers outside of virtual world to talk about tools, techniques, and to have a chance to network and build collaboration.  So here in St. Louis, we are opening up a chapter of Beer and Blog that will meet at the Royale, which is a cool local bar/restaurant of our own. I anticipate seeing political junkies of all stripes, journalists, technology folks, teachers, business people, activists, artists, students, teachers and thinkers/writers of all types. I hope to have fruitful discussions, learn about new technology and, perhaps find new ways to use technology to impact our lives and the world around us. Friendly social setting, good food, great beverages and fun people.

Drop by the blog and let me know what day of the week is good for you, we would like to have a meeting in the first few weeks of February.  Hope to see you there!