This Thursday evening I met with over dozen of amazing .Net developers that share with me both excitement about future of software development and desire to learn and better ourselves.  We are all members of the AltDotNet  newsgroup and reside in Chicago area.  AltDotNet is a global movement and following is our mission statement:

We are a self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.

Our movement is new. The conversation just started. All are welcome to shape and form the dialog in blogs and lists and face-to-face gatherings both local and global.

We met at Jaks Tap for a few hours of discussion, deciding where to go next, and how to build a community.  I am really happy to say that we are moving forward rather quickly.  We have acquired a domain for our future site already, and are in planning phases for building our web site.  Most likely we will use the "Code Camp Server", an open source project that is built using new ASP.NET MVC framework.  Few of us are also contributors to Code Camp Server.   Stay tuned for future anouncements and meantime feel free to join our mailing list.  Meantime if you wish to learn more about this movement please visit AltNetPedia.