Meeting locations?

My office is in Sugar Land, so the southwest side of town would always get my vote, but I'm willing to travel too. Our office could host a large group very easily also. As much as I know the benefits of socializing/networking, I'm all for a presentation during the meetings. I have lots to learn :-)

In my mind, the ideal location would include:

1) inner loop
2) ready access (ie doors don't lock if you are 5 minutes late)
3) ample parking
4) enough room for the group
5) quite / private enough to have presentations
6) a venue were you can order food / beverages

Most of our previous meetings suffered in that they were not quite / private.

As examples, two other monthly groups I attend are NetSquared and Ruby on Rails. NetSquared meets in the private party room at Stag Head Pug. This is perfect for them in that the pub can accommodate 30 to 40 people, have presentations, and have ready access to food and beverages. The Ruby group meets at the Caroline Collective. Once again, they can accommodate a large number of people in a very private setting. They suffer in that they do not have access to sustenance.

I live in The Heights and work in Sugar Land (one exit past where we met last night)...so I will be traveling regardless of the location and therefore have little preference.

I live and work in Katy, but can travel in town for the meeting. The location last night (eMunications office) was great for me - it only took me about half an hour to get there. I've gone to other meetings like this at the Caroline Collective and Coffee Groundz, and those aren't too bad to get to, but would take me about 45 minutes to an hour during rush hour. Honestly, this has actually kept me from coming to some of the previous meetings. By the end of a long day at work, the thought of sitting in a bunch of traffic for an hour just didn't seem that appealing - especially if there isn't a specific topic/presentation to make sure that the time would be well spent. Also, over the past few months, it seems like no one was coming to the meetings (according to postings on this site) when they were planned in the Downtown/Midtown area and so I didn't force myself to not be lazy and drive in to town on the off chance that I might meet one or two other Drupal developers.

While I agree that having a "central" location is good in general, restricting it just to Houston proper (Houston=Houston) isn't really a fair option. By that account there should be a Katy group, a Sugar Land group, a Woodlands group, a Clear Lake group, a Stafford group, and so on...and each group could meet with their 1-3 members and talk about things that interest them. Then we'd never get to meet the rest of the people and each group would probably fizzle out. The reality in a major metropolitan area like Houston is that we can't artificially restrict these meetings to stay in the city limits, and if it goes outside of that say that it doesn't fit the "Houston" group.

I like the idea of moving the meeting place around to different parts of town from month to month to give everyone a chance to have it in their area and not have to sit in a bunch of traffic that month. We can then track how many people come to all the different locations and see if there is a correlation between location and the number of people that come. People can say what they might be willing to do in this forum, but what they actually do when the time for the meeting comes up may be a different thing. I would suggest that if any one or two locations seem to regularly get a big turn out, then we may have found a good location for the meeting.

It's nearing that time of month again.... no not that one. Time to meetup. I'm going to step up here and suggest that the Sugar Land area seems to be a good fit most of the folks responding and that we should thus start planning on something in the area again. That said, let's do the poll.

I liked where we had the last one, but would be open to another location if that fits the needs of the group.