One of the downsides to living in Saginaw, MI is that it's hard to connect with other programmers in the area. The closest place I found that had some kind of a meetup was Flint and that's an hour drive for me and the talks don't always seem to be interesting to me.

My hope is that over the next couple months I can create a social group in the Great Lakes Bay Region for Coders or a PHP User's Group that are interested in having little meetings where we can share the things we've learned. I'm not even 100% sure what's completely needed for this process to occur but my plan is to document my process on this site (along with other things).

The first thing I did was post to the local Craigslist with the following:

Hello, I'm interesting in creating a group that will meet once a month to socialize and have a short talk on a topic of interest to the group related to programming, web design, and technology. If you're interested in joining or helping me setup the group please send me an email and we can discuss this further. If you know of someone else who might be interested please send them a link to this posting.

http://saginaw.craigslist.org/grp/5277635075.html

I'm going to see how that works and then see what other options there are for finding people...