I think that Rob missed my point in his post. I was actually commenting that I was surprised as to how many people turned up (I was expecting 1 or 2) and I agree that the whole point of the coffee group was to be more informal. This will hopefully allow people to share ideas, discuss issues and generally “shoot the breeze” – this is something that is severely missing in Perth at the moment.
Yesterday afternoon I met with Tony Rosser who is very active in the Perth IT community working with not only the ACS and the AIIA but also with DOIR to produce an IT Industry Audit. This will hopefully move us “Beyond the Boom” with a strong and self-sustaining IT Industry. One of Tony’s particular areas of interest is around building IT Clusters. He has been working with a number of vertical clusters (ie technology in a particular market vertical) but more recently has been investigating horizontal clusters (ie focused around the use of a particular technology). This has rekindled an interest of mine which was to establish a .NET cluster here in Perth similar to Victoria.NET (which incidentally was founded through the hardwork of Dr Pete Stanski who runs the popular AusDev mailing list which you can sign up for here)