JPF Home Page Forums Southeast US Chapter Message Boards Tampa Chapter Message Board Tampa Visit January 29th

Hi Folks,

It's locked in. 4400 W. Cyprus, Tampa Florida, the Sheraton Suites, Tampa Airport. It will start at 7pm. Though it can go for several hours, please don't publish the 10PM stop time. We could finish earlier or later and we don't want to make anyone think it's going to last too long or too short or have them think they can show up 2/3rds of the way into it. So just post/publish that it starts at 7PM.

I spoke with Michael about timing. He is going to give us and folks in the Tampa community the first hour and then he's going to do his spiel starting around 8pm (give or take depending on what we plan to do).

What I would like to do is to get all the folks from ALL the other organizations in town involved. Lets find out who they are, what they do, and depending on the final number, lets get them involved, introduce them etc.. this is a perfect chance for us to truly pull the entire TAMPA scene together under one roof. The fact that it's not a showcase is actually a benefit in my opinion because everyone can focus on 2 things: Networking and Education. We'll provide the networking (along with the folks that TAXI brings in) and Laskow during his segment can focus on the educational stuff.

So, in the next few days, I'd like to get a list of the organizations/groups/entities/sites involved in the Tampa (and surrounding areas) music scenes. We could even include media folks that support music, educators in the area, venues that support live artists etc.. Lets get everyone there in the room together. If we can work through logistics, we might even be able to do something as cool as sign up and take a photo of every attendee with their name and contact so we could post it on the site (though that's a lot of work.. it would be amazing to pull off).

If we had those sticker/name tags and some sharpies available, everyone could have names on. It would have to be 100% voluntary of course (some people simply hate that stuff).

We should start getting an idea of which chapter members will be there and which might want to have a role in making all this work. So hopefully Al is getting some RSVP's from the locals. (Only a couple have posted here).

I will send out a notice in the newsletter about the meeting as well and ask folks to contact Al directly as well. If we do this all right, we might overflow the room, so having all the Chapter members on an RSVP ahead of time might assure them of a seat.

I'd also like to get more suggestions from all of you? Because we might have a large number of folks there and not all day for the meeting, anything we do (as far as sign ups) will be tight time wise and we don't want to disrupt the meeting. It might even be an idea to put the tables for sign ups out in the hall so folks could sign up (and if we attempt the picture thing, get their picture taken out in the hall) all during the meeting and not disrupt anyone. I have a good digital cam, but if we are taking tons of peoples pics, we might need several teams to do it accurately (i.e. get the correct name and contact info etc..). Having each person with name tags would help verify the right name is with the right face. Again, this might be too much to do, but imagine if we pulled it off and the next week we had everyone's faces and names on the site as a collective group for the Tampa area. It would be an awesome networking coup!

So, let's hear from you all!

Brian