In September the Detroit JUG was reborn.  Since that time, our Yahoo group list has increased by 25%.  We now have over 200 registered subscribers.   Each of our meetings have been attended by 10 to 20 members. 

Nathan Hughes of ePrize donated meeting space in 2008 and has agreed to let us use the space throughout 2009.

We also have a site that is being actively maintained at http://sites. google.com/ site/detroitjug/ and we've registered www.detroitjug. comwhich currently serves as a doorway to the aforementioned.   

Both ePrize and RIIS sponsored meetings in 2008, so we could provide food and beverages.   

Our group is a member of the Manning and O'Reilly User Group programs.   These publishers donated books that were given away as prizes at meetings.  We've also had gifts donated to us by SitePen, JetBrains, ZeroTurnaround and of course Sun Microsystems.

Steve Goodhall, PMP has been to two meetings and photographed for us.   The photos from Srini's talk will be up soon. 

Both Kirsten Schwark and Srini Penchikala have provided content for the web site.   They have been great sounding boards and co-organizers for the JUG as well.  Their input and support has been invaluable.

Our presentations in 2008 were amazing, 

We have had a few "geek celebrities" join our list and attend meetings.   

Kevin Dangoor of SitePen attended Jim Steinberger' s presentation and brought gifts from SitePen.  Kevin is creator of TurboGears and is a regular speaker at various user groups and conferences.   Kevin blogs at http://www.blueskyo nmars.com/

Dianne Marsh attended Kirsten Schwark's talk.  Dianne is co-owner of SRT Solutions in Ann Arbor. You may have heard her on some JavaPosse podcasts.  She is also a speaker at user groups and conferences and one of the organizers of CodeMash. www.codemash. org

Godfrey Nolan of RIIS in Royal Oak attended Kirsten's talk as well.  He also sponsored our November and December talks.  Godfrey is the author ofDecompiling Java .

Ilya Sterin is a frequent attendee at meetings and has been an active DetroitJUG member.  Ilya is the co-author of  XML and Perl . Ilya also blogs atwww.ilyasterin. com.

Srini Penchikala gave our December talk and co-organizes the Detroit JUG.  Srini writes for www.infoQ.com and will be a speaker for No Fluff, Just Stuff.   Srini is a Software Architect for FlagStar Banks.   Srini has been an amazing asset to our group.

Matt Roush of the Great Lakes IT Report joined our mail list and posts our meeting info on the GLITR calendar.

Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff, Just Stuff also subscribes to our list. 

2009

We already have the following presentations lined up for 2009,