I'm going to be ganking some of the announcement structure from Jeremy Kendall's Memphis PHP Announcement who apparently ganked stuff from @ramsey.

I'm proud to announce that Bloomington, Indiana now has a PHP user group. We also acknowledge the greater Central Indiana area. The goal of this organization is to take over the world help out php users, dabblers, students , and professionals in the surrounding area while encouraging an active developer community. So far we've garnered a decent amount of members in our google group.The amount of activity behind the scenes of the group has been awesome. Matt Hottell, a Lecturer at Indiana  University for the School of Informatics has promised to shamelessly plug notify his students of the PUG (in retrospect, I could've probably shortened the group name) and @_drogers has created a Bloomington Web Developers google group to include more developers in our area that work with more than just PHP. I hope to see more growth in the future and appreciate the efforts given so far. This is, after all, a community effort and I can not do this without the support of the community.

Origin Story

PHP has always been a community experience for me. From the start of learning PHP in my Informatics classes to the mentorship I received from the Resite Sproutbox team, I've seen just how awesome the PHP Community is. It wasn't until last year's php|tek that I wanted to branch that community out into the area I live in. This year's tekx gave me that final push to put things in motion to achieve that dream. I'd like to thank @caseysoftware and @dragonbe for their help and encouragement that made this a reality.

Details

• Since the current members of the google group already meet every Thursday evening at The Alley Bar, I figure why break with tradition. We'll just meet there until the time and need for selecting a quasi-formal arrangement.
• As of right now, we're just using the google group.
• You can follow @bloomingtondevs for community updates and such
  • If you're wondering about the kanji (養) that is used for the user icon, it translates to: foster; bring up; rear; develop; nurture. Edit: The romanji for it is "you", which is pronounced "yo" with a long o.
  • If you want to be in the the bloomington php user group twitter list that I've made, let me know.
  • We have no hashtag, I'd like feedback. So far I'm thinking #btownphp or #bloomingtondevs

Thank you and welcome to Bloomington PHP.

Related articles by Zemanta

• tek x- closing remarks (phpprotip.com)