Inspired by a few WordCamps that built themselves up from local WordPress meet ups, I finally got a few locals together at the beginning of April (Ken DeBlois of Brown and Suzanne McDonald, a freelance writer) to help organize a Providence Meetup. A couple of planning meetings, a new website, a Twitter account, and some local marketing later, we had our first meet up on April 26th.

I’ll be blogging over at the WordPress Providence website, so I won’t say too much about it in this forum, but the headline is that I was thrilled by the turn out and energy at our first event. We had about 30 attendees, a lot of buzz during the hour of networking, a nice and short presentation by DandyID (a local firm with a popular plug-in), and a great after-presentation brainstorming / discussion session.

The feedback has been positive, and we organizers are jazzed to keep the momentum going. On top of our base from the first meet up, I know at least a handful of people who wanted to come but had conflicts, and we already have a couple of RSVPs for our next meet up who were not at at our inaugural event.

In addition to the official website I scraped together, be sure to check out my guest post on RI Nexus, and some photographs of our first meet up over on Flickr. And if you’re in the Rhode Island area, come to our next meet up on May 25th!