Brian Meloche's Blog I'll blog about ColdFusion, weight loss, podcasting and life with too many pets! :-)

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.