How would one go about creating a new alt-coin? I'm looking to create an alt-coin for a club I'm a part of.  All the members of the club will be mining this currency - and we will use it for trade between members. It will also be a learning experience for everyone.

What is the fastest way for me to create this new alt-coin - and assuming everyone will be GPU mining - what would be the best alt-currency to base it off of (or would it be better to base it off of the original bitcoin)?

What programming skills would we need to re-use existing code?

Thanks for your help!

CC
Try looking at these pages:

First, a "Complete Guide on How to Create a New Alt Coin" which, as the name says is a fairly step-by-step guide on how to create a new alt-coin.

Secondly, another thread started by someone who asked essentially the same question as yours: "How do you create an altcoin?"

The discussion which follows is a bunch of people discovering for themselves how to do it. Note that I haven't read through the entire thread (it's 15 pages long as of this posting), so I'm not sure if they ever successfully make an alt-coin or if they give up somewhere along the way. But it's an interesting read to see them figure things out and discover things together as a group.

And finally, A Psuedo [sic] Guide on how to Build an AltCoin, which doesn't go into as much detail as the Complete Guide linked above. In fact, it mostly just links to other threads on bitcointalk.org. That said, it may link to some information that answers some questions left from the other links.