We are pleased to be releasing a new series of content through the INETA Live site. This content comes to us thanks to the hard work of Shawn Weisfeld, INETA Director of Community Activities. Shawn has assembled a presentation recording setup and recorded a number of community presentations to share with a larger audience. He detailed the equipment configuration in a blog post entitled My Recording Rig v1.

The following new recordings have been posted to INETA Live Videos:

	DFW Development Trends	Tim Rayburn +
	Make your Data Dance with ASP.NET Dynamic Data	Shawn Weisfeld
	Developer<T>: Utilizing .NET Generics to Write Better Code	Shawn Weisfeld
	Building your DAL with the ADO.NET EF	Rob Vettor
	Isolating Dependencies in Unit Tests Using Mocks and Stubs	Claudio Lassala
	The Shortest Path From Ideas to Software	Sam Gazitt
	SQL Azure Database	Chris Koenig
	Silverlight 3 for Business Applications	Jason Beres
	Get $(ready).with(Rachel Appel);	Rachel Appel
	Windows Workflow in .NET 4.0	Jennifer Marsman
	VSTS 2010: What’s in it For Me?	Jeff Bramwell
	ASP.NET MVC + jQuery + AJAX Working Together	Ken Byrd
	Introduction to JQuery Part 1 of 4	Chris Morgan
	WCF Service Quality: Understanding Instancing	Ken Byrd
	The State of .NET (Part 1)	Markus Egger
	The State of .NET (Part 2)	Markus Egger
	Monotouch for the iPhone @ Dallas C# SIG	Casey Watson
	ASP.NET MVC in Action	Jeffrey Palermo
	Evolve your code with Extension Methods, Fluent Interfaces, and Expressions	Jonathan Birkholz

We are on the lookout for similar recordings from your user group events to share with the entire community, as well as opportunities to help record events that you have planned. We are also interested in working with sponsors to help expand the reach of this program.

Thanks Shawn and all of the speakers for your efforts in sharing this content.

Please join us in congratulating the recipients of the Q4 2009 INETA Community Champion Award! Gaines Kergosien (Nashville Web Developers Group) Chris Eargle (Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild) John Dunagan (South West Florida .NET Developers Group) Michael Wood (Cincinnati .NET Users Group) Peter Kellner (Silicon Valley CA)

The purpose of the INETA Community Champion Award program is to recognize individuals with the highest levels of contributions. Those exceptional leaders and volunteers who devote innumerable hours towards hosting user group meetings, organizing Code Camps and special events, mentoring and supporting their members, publishing newsletters, updating web sites, and the list goes on and on. The Community Champion program provides INETA with an opportunity to showcase the efforts of our user group communities as a whole as well as provide individual recognition. Recognition that we hope will open doors to networking opportunities, potential sponsors, future employers or partnerships.

Special thanks to everyone who took the time and energy to participate in this program. Keep contributing to your local developer community and submit your activities through the Champs program. This is your chance to show the world what community leadership is all about and to gain some of the recognition that you deserve! For additional information and to view past winners, please go to Community Champions site at http://www.inetachamps.com.

Please contact us with any comments and feedback.

INETA Community Champions Team
noram.champs@ineta.org

The INETA NorAm Board of Directors is now accepting nominations for following positions. General commitment is around 15-20 hours/month including regular bi-weekly Board conference calls and up to two expense-paid in-person weekend Board meetings per year.

DIRECTORS

There are five (5) Director positions which have a one (1) year term. Directors are responsible for overseeing the operation of various projects undertaken by INETA.

Nominations must be submitted by any user group leader of a user group that is a member of INETA or a current Board member. Nominations should include the individual's name, email address, phone number, description of why the individual is qualified for the position, as well as any supporting materials. Candidates are then interviewed by and voted on by the current Board members. Send nominations to noram.secretary@ineta.org no later than Sunday 2/14/2010. Voting will take place on 3/1/2010.

Please direct any questions to noram.secretary@ineta.org.

Now that registration is open for Tech·Ed North America, why not consider arriving a little early and do a little good for the city? Four years since Hurricane Katrina devastated the gulf coast as the worst civil disaster in American history, the city itself is still struggling to rebuild. One of the biggest needs is new housing. INETA Speaker and Director Steve Andrews is organizing a volunteer group to spend a day working with Habitat for Humanity to help rebuild New Orleans on Saturday, June 5, 2010, the Saturday before Tech·Ed. In addition to workers, sponsors are also needed to help cover costs for the volunteers such as transportation, food, drinks, work gloves and other costs.

Please refer to this blog post for more details on volunteering for the team or providing sponsorship for the event.

In appreciation for all you do as a member of the Microsoft community, Tech·Ed North America 2010 is offering INETA User Group Leaders a $500 discount off your full-conference registration price. This special price of $1,695 is good through February 28, 2010. Please visit the User Group Leader Special Offers page under Resources on the INETA website for the discount code.

Summary
The idea of our Speaker Idol event was established in early 2009, shortly after forming an Events Committee for the Baton Rouge .NET User Group. This committee consists of two members and is responsible for coming up with event ideas that would add variation to our current meeting format and for planning additional events that would add value to our development community. Speaker Idol was the first event established by this committee with the primary contributor being Lance Dunnehoo.

The primary objective of the event is to provide an entry point for beginning speakers interested in getting their feet wet without having to talk for an hour and to give us a break from our usual meeting format allowing for multiple members to present and for a multiple topic meeting.

Details
We have established some rules and guidelines in order for this event to be successful:

Five members present for up to fifteen minutes on a technology topic of their choice. The speaker is given a warning with a few minutes remaining and is stopped after the time limit is exceeded. It is important to enforce the time limit as this meeting will at least be an hour and a half. After the presentation, the speaker is asked questions by a three judge panel. For fun, each judge imitates a judge from original American Idol. Judges are a combination of the user group leads and members chosen by the event coordinators. Each judge is limited to one or two questions and they are the only ones allowed to ask them due to time constraints. The questioning generally lasts around five minutes and is intended to be somewhat comical to relieve the stress of the speakers. This period allows for a cleaner transition between presentations as during this time the next speaker is setting up for his presentation. After the final presentation, paper ballots are passed out to each attendee listing each speaker and their topic. The attendees are allowed to vote for only one speaker. The ballots are collected and the organizers count the ballots with the top two winning prizes. While the ballots are being collected and counted, we are doing our raffle and giving away the SWAG. The first place winner receives one hundred dollars worth of gift cards and the second place winner receives fifty dollars worth of gift cards. The gift cards can be for electronics stores, book stores, or restaurants and are contributed by local sponsors.

We have had a variety of topics including Regular Expressions, Open XML, Cucumber, Principles for OO Success, and .NET security vulnerabilities. Presenters have included first timers, up-and-comers, and those trying to polish up their presentation skills. At our first event in July we had one speaker expand on his presentation and later present at our SQL Saturday event. We anticipate that from our December event, many of these speakers will volunteer for another presentation in 2010. Due in part to the success of Speaker Idol and the need for growing our speaker pool, we have decided to integrate a fifteen minute presentation prior to the main presentation during our regular meetings.

Final Thoughts
This event can be somewhat of a challenge. Obtaining local speakers and assisting them to select a topic is a tall order, which we generally leave up to the coordinators of the event. For our event in December we were short presenters until just before the event. The group leadership is busy seeking additional funds for the prizes. The December event was very challenging being the end of the calendar year. Fortunately, we were able to get some assistance from one of our sponsors, GoodPeople, in obtaining sponsorship from two restaurants, Kona Grill and The Grape. The biggest advice that I can give for any leader interested in trying this for one of their meetings is to plan ahead and obtain the speakers and sponsors as early as possible. It will make your life much easier and allow for more time to promote attendance. We have a great deal of experience with this type of event now and have come up with some collateral (flyers, etc). If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact me directly: mikehuguet@gmail.com

Mike Huguet Solutions Architect, Sparkhound, Inc. Co-Leader, Baton Rouge .NET User Group  mhuguet

Florida Microsoft Community Speaker Idol Competition

A similar series of events has been taking place among user groups in Florida. These events will culminate in a regional Speaker Idol competition during February and a state championship round in March. For more details, please refer to this blog entry: http://www.lakelandug.net/SpeakerIdol/tabid/81/Default.aspx

If you have an interesting community event report to share, contact us at noram.marketing@ineta.org.

Looking for a little free publicity for your free community event? Email Chris Williams with your event details (including: name of event, website, date, city & state) and he'll add it to the event listing at the bottom of his new, ongoing Embracing Community column in CoDe Magazine.  Just remember, this is a bimonthly publication and print media lead time is about 2 months.  Event submissions for Jan/Feb 2010 are already closed.  If you are planning something for the April, May, June 2010 timeframe, you have until late January to submit your info. A sample of Chris' CoDe Magazine column can be seen at http://www.code-magazine.com/Article.aspx?quickid=1001041.