My semester-long quest to bring Startup Weekend to Bloomington has a little campaigning to do … at least from the parent organization.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: We’re having our weekend on February 8-10, regardless of the outcome of the voting.
Having been in contact with SW founder Andrew Hyde—and now multiple weekend veteran Tyler Willis—since fall, my expectation is that Tyler will be flying out to Indiana in early February to facilitate our event. I also expect that we’ll finally get that “Date TBA” tag lifted and Bloomington moved to the “Future Weekends” as an endorsed event. Until that happens, though, it is a little difficult to put the hammer down on a massive local campaign for sponsors and participants. I’m not sure why that trigger hasn’t been pulled, but it will be their loss if they can’t make it work.
Gone, apparently, is the support of a subdomain on the SW website. We will be rolling our own event blog and wiki this week, probably courtesy Bloomingpedia and Suso, as well as creating our own groups in various social networking communities. We have an open meeting tomorrow noon at the Design House on Woodlawn, across the street from the Informatics parking lot. Anyone within reading and driving distance is welcome to attend, but the purpose is primarily to get the original committee up to speed and start designating assignments.
More on this later. For now … Vote early. Vote often. Tell your friends, and have them do the same. We may not have the population of some of the cities in the mix, but we do have an opportunity to show how technologically active this area is.