Creating my first LinkedIn group

I was thinking about what to blog next until I ran into some discussion on LinkedIn about why it is so hard to find good Javascript developers. I suggested CoffeeScript, which had really proven itself over the past few years, and got some nasty reactions which led me to some ideas. While altJS.org already has an active mailing list, I did not see such a group and decided to try starting one.

My experience starting these kinds of things so far is relatively limited to things like starting blogs on Blogger, starting a Google mailing list (mostly to capture some important correspondence that I can link to), and registering some dot-com names so this was still a new adventure for me.

It turned out to be quite simple to get started. I just went on the LinkedIn page under Groups and pressed "Create a Group". When I saw the form I was happy that it would be so easy to create the group. For the name, I thought of "Alt2JS" that could very quickly describe the purpose of the group. There was an option to add a logo and I decided to consider a brave attempt to add a decent one.

I have already found the Google Drive to provide some very good online tools and wondered if there would be a good online logo application. I tried searching "make logo online", got a few nice results, and decided to try Logo Ease. I found it was very easy to understand and use to create a simple but very decent logo and was able to upload it very quickly. (I will describe my experiences in a future posting.)

When looking at the form, I next thought of registering a domain for alt2js just in case it may be handy in the future. I was very happy that alt2js.com was still not yet registered so I went ahead and registered alt2js.com.

So now I filled in the Group Name, selected the Group Type (Professional Group), Summary, and Description. The one critique I had was that the Access option was set to "Request to Join" by default. I have seen a number of groups that had transitioned from closed to public and now I have come to understand why. So I selected Auto-Join and was happy that all the access sub-options (display in groups directory, allow members to display logos, and allow members to invite others) were now enabled by default.

To finish I pressed the button to "Create an Open Group", got a nice form to invite some of my connections to the group, and now have a nice new LinkedIn Alt2JS group.