Help us bring Ben Forta to Cleveland...

Many of you know that I manage the Cleveland Adobe Users Group (AUG, formerly the Cleveland MMUG), and have recently taken over the Cleveland ColdFusion Users Group (CFUG), a group that I co-founded with the previous manager, Mick Keily.

I heard from Adobe today that it MIGHT be possible to get Ben Forta to come to Cleveland to speak to the Cleveland area user groups. For the few of you that don't recognize the name, Ben is the Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe, and is probably the most well known speaker and author in the ColdFusion world. If we can secure him, he'd speak in Cleveland during his upcoming ColdFusion 8 (Scorpio) world tour. I've been working on having Ben speak here for nearly THREE years!!! It might finally be a possibility to have him come one night this spring.

This is NOT a reality yet... it will take a BIG effort to secure him.

To get him, we NEED to show we could have a big attendance mark... really BIG. We need help from anyone out there who lives close enough to Cleveland to come out.

In order to have Adobe commit to bring Ben Forta here, we need to have 100 people say, "yes, I would like to attend". If there's NO WAY for you to attend a Cleveland meeting IN PERSON, please DO NOT respond.

If you're in driving distance of Cleveland, and interested in attending, please email me at brianmeloche at gmail dot com, or leave a comment on this thread. Just by sending messages to the two user groups, I've already got 16 people after a few hours... only 84 more!!! I'm now expanding it to the blog...

I will create a poll on the user group websites in the next day or two, but, until then, I want to gather numbers through old fashioned email and blog comments.

Please pass this on to ANYONE who might be interested in attending this meeting. Friends, co-workers, students, family, colleagues... whatever... able to attend a Cleveland appearance by Ben Forta IN PERSON. We need 100 people.

Contest: If we get Ben, the member of either the AUG or CFUG that either recruits the most new members and/or brings the most people to the meet will win a prize. I'll announce the prize at a later date, once he's been secured. If we get him, one attendee will win a copy of ColdFusion 8, once it has been released.

To RSVP, please give me your name, and how many people you could bring. YOU MUST REPLY to RSVP. For every person to be counted, I must have it documented.

I'll keep you up to date on the totals.

Let's prove that we can draw big numbers for Ben!!!