New Coldfusion User Group

April 23, 2008

I'm in the process of starting up a new Coldfusion User Group in the South West of England. So far the site is up (www.devoncfug.org.uk) and the first meeting is scheduled. What I'm a bit unclear about is how the whole thing works.

I'm interested to know how you get people to share their ideas? From my initial feedback people want to come and learn but not give away any of their knowledge - the worry is that same person (i.e. me!) will end up doing free tutorials without getting any knowledge back.

My company is kindly allowing me to run this group and use our resources, but I don't think they be too happy in giving away what is potentially commercially usable knowledge.

If anyone has some advice please let know. Thanks!

4 comments

  1. Keep us informed how it goes, I've been tempted before with trying to setup a cfug in South Wales but didn't know where to start and what it really entails.

    Good luck, I hope you get the help you need. :)

    Comment by David Boyer – April 23, 2008
  2. John,

    if you give free tutorials, and then the next time someone else does the same, in what way are people then afraid of sharing their knowledge without getting anything in return? I mean, isn't that just what you're doing then???

    And I feel it's just this kind of attitude and behaviour that has created a problem for CF over the years. We're such a tight, closed community that we're in danger of killing off our selves. There's no need for Ruby, PHP or .NET to invest any time in that department when the CF-developers behave like this...

    I therefore applaud all the CF Open Sourcing that's been happening the last couple of months / year, especially fronted by Raymond Camden et al. Go guys.

    Good luck with setting up and maintaining your devoncfug ;-)

    Comment by Sebastiaan – April 23, 2008
  3. @David - thanks. The guys at UKCFUG were very encouraging when I suggested it. You may even get a free t-shirt out of it :)

    @Sebastiaan,

    I'm trying to spread the CF knowledge (hence this blog and setting up the user group) so I hope you don't think I have a bad attitude :)

    I've learnt a lot from reading blogs etc and now think I have enough knowledge to provide something userful back to the community.

    I am the only CF developer in my company at present so really want to learn from others / bounce ideas around. I think that in any profession (or language) there will be people who want to take and not give. PHP seems to have lots of tutorials, but equally I suspect that the percentage of people blogging etc is about the same as CF developers. Your right in that it is a mindset, maybe I should make a condition of attending the group that you do at least one presentation a year?

    I'm just after other people's thoughts, and experience about runnning groups.

    P.S. I hope to release this blog code (Fusebox no xml) on RIAForge very soon.

    Comment by John Whish – April 23, 2008
  4. Hi John,

    no that's just it, I figured from your blogentry that your mindset is the one I hope more CF-developers would get: share, share, share. There's nothing out there that someone else in one way or the other hasn't developed before. Ctrl+C Ctrl+V and then adapting and innovating should be a developers mantra ;-)

    I applaud your effort and do hope that you succeed in setting up the CFUG.

    Comment by Sebastiaan – April 23, 2008

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