BOF: Promoting ColdFusion Outside of the ColdFusion Community - Interim Report
There have been a number of people that have expressed interest in my MAX BOF called "Promoting ColdFusion Outside of the ColdFusion Community" and have wanted to hear what the results of them were.
To clarify the BOF, and considering that we only had an hour, we only focussed on community efforts, not Adobe's.
I started off the BOF with a PowerPoint outlining the ground rules and giving instructions. You can find my PowerPoint here:
http://www.brianmeloche.com/blog/enclosures/PromotingColdFusionBOF.ppt
The people in the BOF then voted on what audiences they felt were the most important audiences to target the messages. There were two standouts: IT management and non-ColdFusion developers. Several other audiences tied for third. The attendees split into three groups: One focussed on IT Management, one on non-ColdFusion developers, while the third was given the option which audience they would target. That group picked Education as their audience.
The first group, IT Management, seemed to have some trouble coming to an agreement on things (from my outside perspective) and seemed to argue when coming up with the ideas, which didn't follow my instructions. They produced a collection of ideas, found here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_10hp2tsg
Unfortunately, they were unable to take it to completion and develop the strategy. I'll give those team members access to the document, as a chance to continue to develop the strategy as time allows.
The second group, non-ColdFusion developers, were able to follow the process and came up with a strategy, which can be found here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_11gvphp6
To my knowledge, the third group, focussed on education, were also able to develop a strategy. Unfortunately, they did not follow what I did and use Google Docs. Instead, they used Buzzword. Now, I wholeheartedly support using Buzzword, except that I don't yet have access to their results, so I can't publish the results at this time. I have tried contacting the person who took the notes, but to no avail. I had waited long enough, so I decided to post what I have from the other two groups.
When I get the results of the education group, I'll post them here.
The BOF was a success, although not a complete one. We didn't have enough time, and we didn't get to do what I wanted: Use post-it notes, sharpies and white boards to write down the ideas. If I get a chance to do this BOF again, I'll ask for more time and have the needed materials. I'll also dictate how the results would be collected, so we don't have another group 3 (where we're still waiting on the results.)
I am going to follow up this blog post with the results from the non-ColdFusion developers group.
To clarify the BOF, and considering that we only had an hour, we only focussed on community efforts, not Adobe's.
I started off the BOF with a PowerPoint outlining the ground rules and giving instructions. You can find my PowerPoint here:
http://www.brianmeloche.com/blog/enclosures/PromotingColdFusionBOF.ppt
The people in the BOF then voted on what audiences they felt were the most important audiences to target the messages. There were two standouts: IT management and non-ColdFusion developers. Several other audiences tied for third. The attendees split into three groups: One focussed on IT Management, one on non-ColdFusion developers, while the third was given the option which audience they would target. That group picked Education as their audience.
The first group, IT Management, seemed to have some trouble coming to an agreement on things (from my outside perspective) and seemed to argue when coming up with the ideas, which didn't follow my instructions. They produced a collection of ideas, found here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_10hp2tsg
Unfortunately, they were unable to take it to completion and develop the strategy. I'll give those team members access to the document, as a chance to continue to develop the strategy as time allows.
The second group, non-ColdFusion developers, were able to follow the process and came up with a strategy, which can be found here:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcdhg6m6_11gvphp6
To my knowledge, the third group, focussed on education, were also able to develop a strategy. Unfortunately, they did not follow what I did and use Google Docs. Instead, they used Buzzword. Now, I wholeheartedly support using Buzzword, except that I don't yet have access to their results, so I can't publish the results at this time. I have tried contacting the person who took the notes, but to no avail. I had waited long enough, so I decided to post what I have from the other two groups.
When I get the results of the education group, I'll post them here.
The BOF was a success, although not a complete one. We didn't have enough time, and we didn't get to do what I wanted: Use post-it notes, sharpies and white boards to write down the ideas. If I get a chance to do this BOF again, I'll ask for more time and have the needed materials. I'll also dictate how the results would be collected, so we don't have another group 3 (where we're still waiting on the results.)
I am going to follow up this blog post with the results from the non-ColdFusion developers group.
TrackBacks
There are no trackbacks for this entry.
Trackback URL for this entry:
http://www.brianmeloche.com/blog/trackback.cfm?798E9F2A-3048-2E57-0A91B86E19ACB103
http://www.brianmeloche.com/blog/trackback.cfm?798E9F2A-3048-2E57-0A91B86E19ACB103
Education is my industry. I'll be looking forward to their report. Because I'm driving the freshening of curricula at my institution (multimedia focus) I've got my own strategy that I'll be comparing their report to.
Just to let people know I've finally got Adobe in my part of the world to guarentee a free copy of CF8 Ent for teaching and learning in the classroom (eg: for student work) - some thing I've been fighting for since CF6.1. We lost teaching CF to the likes of PHP for a couple of years because of this - I'm working hard to reverse that.
another plan of attack is to piggy-back CF onto the teaching of Flex and other emerging Adobe technologies as the default server-side platform of choice - get CF into the classroom by stealth.
Adobe are starting to listen and take this seriously, it seems. watch this space.
Sure there are always enthusiastic groups who write good tutorials and demos to help support those in their specialist field, but that's always on top of the efforts that the publishing company puts in, not to mention marketing and advertising to make people outside of the community fully aware of the virtues of their product.
It is a chicken and egg situation though. If we, the community, don't do everything that you outlined then where will the future CF developers come from? When I want to employ fresh CF developers I will be stuck for choice and I may not be able to afford the salaries of the limited pool of existing, long time, CF experts.
As far as your comments are concerned, I had to severely trim down the BOF to eliminate us turning it into a "tell Adobe everything they should be doing to promote ColdFusion". Some of that was because of time, but it was also because the community needs to do more... and we always use Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire as a crutch. Ruby doesn't have a company promoting it, yet that language has made a lot of inroads because of the Ruby (and Rails) community. ColdFusion developers shouldn't have to depend on Adobe doing the work. Sure, it would be nice if Adobe would do more, and I believe they aren't taking the negative publicity this year seriously enough and SHOULD BE doing more. If we had time, we would have gone there, but there's only so much you can do in an hour.
Promoting ColdFusion
Education Group
Find areas outside of traditional Comp Sci programs to promote within education.
How depends on the type of school.
User groups hook up with local schools to promote ColdFusion
Teach younger. Target high school students.
Encourage ColdFusion User Group managers to contact local schools and let them know about ColdFusion resources in the community.
Find dates for "career days" and present.
Job training programs and continuing ed, Economic Development Councils
Students use social networking sites. Find a social networking site to tie CF apps to early in the adoption cycle and build CF stuff on top of their APIs.
I would think that In the case of commercial solutions, such as ColdFusion, Websphere, .NET, etc., it is expected that the company does the primary champion, evangelism, and marketing.
WebSphere is a weird example, since it's a J2EE server. As such, WebSphere benefits from the open source Java movement. As far as .NET, Microsoft is a marketing monolith. Adobe, while a big company, is no Microsoft.
If we agree that it's Adobe's job, we should shut up and quit whining, and if ColdFusion's fate is to die, let it die. That said, I don't agree.