GeekDinner: Dangerous Drumstick reportback

My own private birthday party (also known as the Dangerous Drumstick GeekDinner) was held last night (and bits of this morning for some of us).  I think we've got the formula right - it seems to have been a great success, and we're obviously reaching new people, given that we probably had a good 20% of the diners being first-timers.

It was a slightly smaller than usual event, though, but I think that's mostly to do with the geographical location of the venue.  Besides the location, the venue, Summerville, worked out great.  There were a few people unable to see the screen from their dinner seats, but they made a plan.  The service was excellent - swift, timeous, and the food was prepared in decent sized portions and at a good quality.  Got a good price for the food, and got corkage waived on the wine, and they provided Plasma screens, sound equipment, and microphones!  (And when we checked if everything went well for them, they said they'd love to have us again!)

The wine was sponsored by GetWine again.  These guys are great - not only giving us 24 bottles of their fine Sénga wine, but giving the diners a special GeekDinner deal to save a good R100 from a case of the wines they provided (AND they gave a really well-received talk at the previous GeekDinner, Carnivorous Cantaloupe in July).  We had a white blend named Sénga Ilanda (Chenin Blanc/Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc/Viognier) and (as usual, much preferred) a red option in a Sénga Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon.

Ashley Shaw (who doesn't seem to have a personal web site anymore, but who is responsible for Lightspeed 2.0) gave a tour of the variations of social networking out there - aggregators vs. social bookmarking vs. plain social networking and so forth.  As a pretty social-network-aware geek, there was nothing new for me, but I think it was a good introduction to the many geeks who're being slowly dragged kicking and screaming into the new era.  If you're interested in that, Ashley posted something about Between The Lines Advertising of which this talk is probably the first of many explorations into the space.

Stefano Rivera spoke on CAcert.org, which is a free way to get trustworthy digital certificates based on individuals assuring each other in a similar way to a web of trust (except with points).

Ian Gilfillan and Jonathan Hitchcock spoke a bit about the Cape Town Wikimania 2008 bid, which looks to be in pretty good shape at the moment.  Wikimania is the annual Wikimedia Foundation (the guys behind Wikipedia) conference, and Wikimania 2008 is the fourth one.

Johann "Joe" Botha gave an update on SchoolWAN (the mostly-wireless effort to connect schools to the Internet), WAPA (the wireless industry organisation), on wifi.org.za (which isn't quite live yet), and gave away some pirate frog Frogfoot t-shirts and an access point or two (or I just imagined that, since I probably was on my fifth tequila at the time).

I think I've forgotten someone (sorry, the tequila's fault), but then I soft-launched *Camp, which is a self-organising not-a-conference in the BarCamp spirit that we're organising in December in Cape Town for anything technology or Internet related.  "We" isn't well-defined yet, but so far a bunch of GeekDinner people have offered to help out with *Camp planning, and I'll be chatting with the great guys I met at BarCamp Cape Town 2006 and the guys who generally hang out at the 27dinners about making this something big together!

In the "open mic", Nick Coyne announced that he's interested in putting together a Ruby / Ruby on Rails user group (I assume with meetings and so forth) in Cape Town.  If you're interested, please get in contact with him.

It was an awesome evening (even if I was at the Ruby / Ruby on Rails table with  Nick and Farrel Lifson), and thanks to everyone who attended for doing so, and also to those who spoke, and to those who bought me drinks (thanks especially to Bryn!) and wished me well on my birthday.

Other coverage by Tania, Joe (and Joe and Joe's pics), and Ian so far.