Our little meetup now has a name: Vancouver Globalization and Localization Users Group, or VanGLUG for short. Follow us as @VanGLUG on Twitter.  We had an outreach meeting in late January. So it’s long past time to conclude this series of thoughts about VanGLUG. Part 3 discusses “Where, When, and How”. Earlier in the series were A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (1) What, Who (Oct 31, 2014), and A Technology Globalization meetup for the Vancouver Area: (2) Why, Naming (Dec 31, 2014).

Where

One challenge of an in-person meeting is where to hold it. The usual habit for such events is to meet in downtown Vancouver. This can be inconvenient, not to mention tedious, for those of us in Surrey or Burnaby. But I expect this is how we will start.

I would, however, be delighted if there was enough interest in other parts of the Lower Mainland to start up satellite groups in other locations as well.

Could we meet virtually?  In this day and age, it should be cheap and practical to do a simple webcast of meetings. Some may want to participate remotely. An IRC channel or Twitter “second screen” may emerge. But in my experience, the networking which I suspect will be our biggest contribution will come from in-person attendance.

When

In an era of busy schedules, finding a time to meet is likely an overconstrained problem. Our technology industry tends to hold meetings like this on weekday evenings, sometimes over beer, and I suspect that is how we will start. But it is interesting to consider breakfast or lunch meetings.

When to get started?  The arrival of Localization World 2014 in Vancouver got a dozen local localization people to attend, and provided the impetus to turn interest into concrete plans. After Localization world, we started communicating and planning. The net result was a first meeting in mid-day of Monday, December 8, 2014. Despite the holiday distraction, we were able to land a spot guest-presenting to VanDev on 6 essentials every developer should know about international. Our next opportunity to meet will likely be April 2015, perhaps March.

How

The Twitter feed @VanGLUG was our first communications channel. I encourage any Twitter user interested in monitoring this effort to follow @VanGLUG. We have 37 followers at the moment. We were using the twitter handle @IMLIG1604 before, and changed that name while keeping our followers. The present @IMLIG1604 handle is a mop-up account, to point stragglers to @VanGLUG.We created a group on LinkedIn to use as a discussion forum. This has the snappy and memorable URL https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=6805530. If you use LinkedIn, are in the Lower Mainland or nearby, and are interested in localization and related disciplines, we welcome you joining the LinkedIn Group. We are also accepting members from out of area (for instance, Washington and Oregon) in the interests of cross-group coordination. But for location-independent localization or globalization discussion, there are more appropriate groups already on LinkedIn.

Subsequent communications channels might perhaps include a Meetup group (if we want to put up the money), an email list, an outpost on a Facebook page, and other channels as there is interest.

GALA (the Globalization and Language Association) is one of our industry organisations. It has a membership and affiliate list that includes people from the Vancouver region. I spoke with one of their staff at Localization World. They are interested in encouraging local community groups. I believe this initiative is directly in line with their interest: we can be the local GALA community for here.  They have included us in a list of regional Localization User Groups. We are also on IMUG’s list of “IMUG-style” groups.
Do you want to see this meetup grow? If so, I welcome your input and participation. You can tweet to @VanGLUG, post comments on this blog, or send me email at jdlh “at” jdlh.com. Call me at +1-604-376-8953.

See you at the meetings!

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