http://www.meetup.com/ColumbiaDevelopers/ This group serves as a networking and training forum for developers in the Midlands. I want to include academia in this group. I believe that students and professionals will have a lot to share and learn from each other. This group will meet once a month at ITology. Right now, this is slated to be the first Thursday in each month. Our first meeting will be March 5. Each meeting will have the general format of a brief networking opportunity followed by a featured presentation that will generally be an hour long and then a developer notebook style presentation that will generally be 30 minutes and will showcase something that the presenter has recently learned along with how he/she went about learning it. Most presentations will be made by developers from the community. Occasionally we may have professional speakers from the industry come to speak. These will not be marketing sales pitches but detailed product demos with a focus on tech details over marketing hype. Many of the topics discussed may be of particular interest to students in your Software Engineering and Web Applications classes.