Yesterday we held the second dinner gathering of the Boston Genius Workshop. It was great! About 30 people showed up. I met a bunch of new people — and I organized the damn thing (with co-host Susan Kaup). I heard about a lot of cool things people are working on, and participated in some pretty interesting arguments. We had three big tables in a private room at Christopher's in Porter Square, which was an excellent setting. And the Salmon Fettucine I had was delicious.

The Genius Workshop has a pretentious-sounding name, and I've taken to explaining that genius is an aspiration, not some qualification we think we already have under our belts. Ingenious ideas arise when you get smart people talking to each other. Or at least they have fun. This is just one attempt to smush together a few of the smarties I know.

One thing we did differently this time around was tell everyone we invited to suggest some new attendees. This worked wonderfully; at least a third of our attendees were people Susan and I hadn't met before. And it's safe to say that nobody went the whole evening without talking to someone they'd never before met. A nice complement to that was a couple of folks who were acquainted, but hadn't seen each other in 3 years until last night.

Here's something I'm puzzled about: should we open up Genius Workshop gatherings? So far, we've been trying to grow through existing social networks rather than public advertising. On one hand, this troubles the geek in me, who would have found this exclusivity intimidating just a year or two ago. On the other hand, I want a core of the group to be recognizable and intimate. Genius Workshop attendees: what do you think? Non-attendees: would you be more interested if it were an open event, or if you received an invitation from someone you knew? Note that in either case, if we are to have dinner gatherings at restaurants, we'll still need serious RSVPs so that we can make accurate reservations.

Update: photos from the 2 May dinner!

Coming soon: a mailing list for our attendees. And should we publish a roster (with short bios) on the web?

The Genius Workshop dinner Sooz and I hosted went wonderfully. I'll write more about it soon but in the meantime I took some pictures and Peter Caputa compiled a handy list of attendees' websites.