There are a couple of important happenings in the next few days.
This evening will be the monthly chapter meeting of the Southern Michigan IGDA (International Game Developers Association). This October meeting is an Education Roundtable which will feature several area game/multimedia professors, including Dr. Bruce Maxim of UofM – Dearborn, Brian Winn of Michigan State University, Kim Callery of IADT Detroit, and Jacob Pollak of Schoolcraft College.
For those who are close enough to attend, the meeting will take place on the University of Michigan – Dearborn campus (4901 Evergreen Road, Dearborn, MI). It will start at 6:00pm, running until perhaps 9:00pm, in auditorium room 1011 of the IAVS (Borg Warner) building. (No, I am not exactly sure where that is, either, but here is a campus map.)
Starting tomorrow will be the Bloomington Schmooze 2007, the latest installment of the Fall Shareware Schmooze, this time hosted by Eric Isaacson of Eric Isaacson Software, makers of ZIPKEY. This schmooze will run Thursday through Sunday, with home base at the Abe Martin Lodge within Indiana’s Brown County State Park, near Nashville (Indiana, not Tennessee).
A shareware schmooze is a unique networking (and socializing) event in which people who, for the most part, work online gather in one location to meet in person. There is no fixed agenda, so the activities can vary from simply sitting in comfortable chairs drinking and snacking all weekend, to opening laptops and working on technical software issues, to visiting local points of interest, to discussing business, politics, sports, the weather, or nothing at all. For more information, visit the official shareware schmooze page.
If you are in the area and have an interest in either building the game industry in Michigan or in the education of our next generation of game developers, stop by the IGDA chapter meeting. If you are involved in development of games and/or independent software of any kind, I urge you to come to the Shareware Schmooze, if even for just part of a day, to meet others who are making a living in the industry.
Sorry for the late notice.