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coffee house coders - Wednesdays, 9pm-11pm Eastern, Espresso Royale Cafe, State St
from Ed Vielmetti, at http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2008/11/coffee-house-coders-wednesdays-9pm-11pm-eastern-espresso-royale-cafe-state-st.html:
Coffee House Coders is a programmer's group that meets Wednesday nights at ERC State St in Ann Arbor. A large long table in the back hosts a dozen or so laptops, and the assembled crowd works on whatever code they are working on.
Organized by 
Zach Steindler, this group when I visited last week was mostly current and recent UM engineering students, with a few people from out of town visiting old friends. I saw a demo of a new product under development by Occipital, which looked kind of like Doom set in cities, designed to run on a mobile phone.
At Coffee House Coders I learned about CouchDB, an object database which has an interesting data model - throw JSON objects into a big flat store, and retrieve them with Javascript map/reduce functions. My favorite Django person, Brian Kerr, pointed me at a tutorial on how to implement a hierarchical database in this system.
One notable aspect of Coffee House Coders is that they don't try to create an existence for the group between meetings; there's no ongoing email list as such for discussion, and no permanent home on the web for chit-chat. To make up for that, their network is online and connected when the meeting happens via IRC (irc.freenode.net, channel #coffeehousecoders; I used Mibbit as a client), Twitter (#coffeehousecoders), and Skype (coffeehousecoders).
The a2geeks mailing list is used to gently nudge people to show up.