Well, the meeting is whatever you make it. However, with that being said, one of the things that sets us apart from other meetings is that we *do* have several ideas for activities and projects that we hope people will find interesting and get involved in. We want people to work together and actually produce something of value to the hacker community. It could be as simple as writing an article, or it could be writing a piece of software. It could be researching a topic for an informal presentation, or it could be putting togetehr a formal presentation for an upcoming conference.

Below, we list several ideas for fun projects that we can choose from at our meetings.

Wardriving: Have a few designated drivers and get together in groups with multiple laptops and go wardriving in different areas near your meeting. Ideally, you will have multiple Operating Systems, hardware and software so that you can see the differences in them and combine data. Ultimately, you can upload the data to a particular web site like Wigle.

Software reviews/show-and-tell: Software reviews are always great topics. Always of interest are different security tools, linux distros, or even general software. Bring a laptop and demo it or get screenshots and put together a presentation or a "how-to" for a particular process. Code for applications that you have written yourself are alwyas interesting as well.

Hardware review/show-and-tell: Almost all hackers are interested in almost all kinds of hardware! Whether it be phones, computers, switches, or some obscure device that may not be familiar to most people. Bring in your hardware and give demos of it and stories/history of it. Maybe make some goals on how to hack it or make a project out of it.

Presentations!: Put together presentations on almost any tech topic. Hacking topic are preferred, but frankly, most hackers love technology of any kind so presentations of just about any tech topic could be interesting. Preferred topics would be exploits, security news, and "how-to" walkthroughs. This is also a great way to make a small presentation and then possibly develop it into a full length presentation that you could offer to present at one of the hacking conferences that are scattered around.

Group Projects: Hackers tend to work alone, but some of the greatest projects have come from groups. Over the course of your meetings, if you come up with an interesting idea or topic, see if your fellow attendees want to work together and work on it to make it a reality. It can be software or hardware based or even a simple process change or script of some kind. Make a cool application and release it as a group! We will gladly give you web space/hosting to upload files and work on projects like this.

Upgrade the meeting place: If your chosen meeting place does not have wireless access, maybe you can contact the owner/manager and offer to help with the installation of this for their customers. Many places would love to offer free wifi but cannot afford to hire someone to do it for them. Offer to help them set it up for free if they simply buy the hardware. Now, you (and everyone else) will have free wifi and you will have formed a good relationship with the business. Note that this is not limited to wifi. If there is something else that you think would be good to have, offer to help make it happen. It is a great learning experience that you can use in the real world (if you havent already).

YAPL: This is a great first project for meetings. Walk around your location (mall or otherwise) and locate all of the payphones that are available. Submit them to YAPL right there from the phone. Then go to the yapl.org website and fill in the rest of the information later. Adopt the payphones in your area and you can always look up the numbers if you ever "need" them. ;)

Volunteer work: There are many small charities or non-profit organizations out there who cannot afford to have a website developed. Most of them would love to have someone offer to design and host a site for them for free! We will gladly host any sites for projects like this! Not only is this a good learning experience for you, but it also helps to overcome that reputation of hackers as the bad guys. We can be (and often are) very helpful, so let's show it! Contact a DDP member and we will setup hosting for almost any site that you want to work on. We have several CMS systems that are available and once it is up and running, you can turn the site over to them to maintain.