A belated update here to say that we had our best NetSquared meetup yet here in Washington, DC this past Wednesday -- at least 23 people came out to Buffalo Billiards in Dupont Circle at around 7pm, and the last person from our group wasn't out of there until well after 10p.

Thanks to everyone's help spreading the word about the April meetup, our group turned out to be a great mix of people from both the tech and nonprofit/social change worlds (and fortunately we're in DC, so we had a plenty of folks straddling both!). I should also note that we had a solid turnout from people doing international work, which added a great dimension to the group.

Check out some of our photos from both March and April, and sign up for next month's if you're in the area!

In the April photos, you'll notice one or two pics of our featured speaker, Alan Rosenblatt.  Our goal this month was to start thinking about what the future intersection of of tech innovation and social change might look like, so we invited Alan Rosenblatt, Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center (and long-time expert), to kick us off with a few words.

Alan spoke about the role that technology can play in building meta social change communities (i'm particularly interested in this from the climate change perspective) and helped to reinforce the point -- easily missed -- that online communities "by assertion" (i.e. those designated as such by a membership organization) generally don't even begin to achieve the network's potential. It's the difference between enabling community members to go and make the network bigger and stronger on their own and an organization that only sees a large pool of people to tap for fundraising asks or to sign online petitions. And that launched us into a lot of smaller group conversations, where we all met a bunch of new folks, and the night went on...

If you attended our meetup last Wed, I hope you'll add a comment about your take-aways from Alan's talk or let us know what you talked about afterwards -- it'll be interesting to compare

Finally, a big special thanks to Justin and Care2 for sponsoring our first round of drinks and nachos -- that really helped to get us rollin.

See you next month!