what do I know

The first Adobe Developers of Orlando User Group meeting is tomorrow night, 08/07/07, @ 7:00 PM just in case anyone has forgotten. If you are in the Central Florida area, please come out and support your local user group! There will be two topics for the evening: Flex and ColdFusion Applications the Easy Way with Coldspring, Birds Of a Feather - Rich Internet Applications. Adam Fortuna and Maxim Porges will be presenting respectively.

Can’t wait to see everyone there!

I want to give my thanks to everyone who came out to the organizational meeting for the Orlando Adobe [something] User Group that we are trying to put together. We had some truly awesome feedback from everyone and I think we’re really going to have some dynamite material and resources to start out with in August. Thanks to Joe and John, Mario, and all of the CFI crowd for coming out to contribute.

I’d like to congratulate Adam Fortuna on his recent appointment to Manager of the user group. He’s a hard working contributor to the ColdFusion community and we’re extremely lucky to have him. Way to go Adam! We have lots of people willing to participate and lots of work to do. We should be posting updates to our blogs over the next few weeks with plenty of polls and details to come.

In fact, one of our first orders of business is to decide on a name for the user group. We’re not trying to take ourselves too serious here, however I’m sure we can find a nice balance with the professional. Any ideas? Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

Well we’ve decided to start putting together an initiative to organize an Adobe Developer’s Group in Orlando. A bunch of us from CFI are going to meet a Bear Rock Cafe in Millenia @ 7:00 PM on Thursday, June 14th, 2007. I’ve been told they have free wifi as well, so that’s an added bonus. We’ll be discussing the following topics lead by myself, Max Porges, and Adam Fortuna:

• Meeting format, time, and location
• Possible topics to be covered at the meetings
• Web presence
• Leadership and responsibilities
• User group name

Anyone who is interested in helping organize this group please attend. We can use all the help we can get. See you all there!

NOTE: Unfortunately since we are just starting out, there is no sponsor for this event so we will just be meeting at the Bear Rock informally. Food will not be provided, but I’ll show up a little early and get some food. Sorry everyone.

So I was on Adobe’s site tonight and decided to search for a ColdFusion User Group in Central Florida. To my dismay, there isn’t one in the Central Florida area except for Tampa which I consider the West Coast of FL and too far of a drive from Melbourne. I expected to at least see a presence in Orlando, after all I know of tons of shops in Orlando that use CF pretty religiously (CFI, FCE Corp, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Blue Tangerine, Harris, Orange County, Osceola County, etc.). I did a search on Google and came up with these guys: ArcIMS and ColdFusion User Group. Does anyone know if this group is active? I see job postings from pretty recent, but the meeting dates are long over and the site doesn’t seem to be too active.

Out of curiosity, I read the info on what it would take to create an OCFUG. Wow, that could potentially be a lot of work and go against my goal of decreasing my responsibility in life. That being said, would anyone else be interested in participating in an Orlando CF User Group? If there was enough of a demand, I’d be up for helping out. I know the ORUG and OJUG work pretty closely together, maybe they could give some tips on location and such. I could even see the inclusion of Flex into the topic list for the UG meetings. Do any current user group leaders in other areas have any suggestions on getting people interested in creating an Orlando ColdFusion User Group and me being motivated ?