Have you heard about the Last Thursday CMS meet ups?

Content Management Professionals are getting together in informal gatherings over a few beers to share their experiences, starting in London the phenomena is spreading with Last Thursday chapters springing up in New York and San Francisco - with more planned in Boston, Paris and Amsterdam.

The rules are simple, on the last Thursday of every month, assemble a quorum of CMS chums, pick a location, spread the word and be prepared to meet some interesting folks.

A simple recipe, cooked up by Jon Marks (as a founding father of the London event), that's been running for just over a year now. I've attended a few times and besides enjoying a beer with the extremely knowledgeable Mr Marks, they've had various interesting folks drop by, a good collection of practitioners, analysts, open source guys and vendors (Read this post by Theresa Regli of CMSWatch /Real Story Group).

These events are being promoted and co-ordinated on Twitter, look out for the #LastThursdayCMS hashtag or on LinkedIn, where Last Thursday groups are being created (for example: London, New York and SF). 

Some of the groups are also using http://www.meetup.com to co-ordinate the meetings - here are the links:

London: http://www.meetup.com/London-CMS/

Paris: http://www.meetup.com/last-thursday-cms-paris/

San Francisco: http://www.meetup.com/last-thursday-cms-sf-bay-area/

I was fortunate enough to be at the inaurgural Last Thursday in San Francisco last week (the 'Last Thursday' rule was bent a little bit as the Gilbane conference was in town) - but the guys got the ball rolling with a nice turnout in a nice location over looking the city.

Find out the latest on Jon Marks' blog: http://jonontech.com/2010/05/20/global-cms-geekery/

Update - whilst Jon Marks has done a great deal to promote the London CMS event, Kenton Ward is the organiser - my apologies!

Update 8th June: A new group has been created in Geneva, with their inaugural meeting happening on 24th June - you can register for the Geneva Last Thursday group here or follow the #CMSGeekUpGeneva hashtag on Twitter.

Update 15th July: A new group has been created in Dallas-Ft. Worth, with their first meet-up happening on July 29th - you can register for it here: http://cmsgeekupdfw.eventbrite.com/ and follow the hashtag: #CMSGeekUpDFW on Twitter. 

Ian is currently Senior Analyst at The Gilbane Group, with a strong web content management pedigree, having focused on web technologies for the last ten years, working with some of the major vendors and pioneers in this area

Ian is a blogger (http://www.iantruscott.com), tweeter (@iantruscott) and a frequent public speaker, talking at various industry events and seminars – you may have seen him at events including Technology for Marketing, Gilbane Conference, Butler CMS Symposium and Internet World.