Adobe was called in to be a last minute sponsor of MuraCON.  Over (70) ColdFusion and Web Developers attended a 2 day conference at Drexel University campus in Sacramento. Nice venue right by the river and down the street from the California capital building.  The MuraCon organizers assured me that they wanted to start small with this event.  In fact, they weren’t even sure anybody would come! Boy, were they surprised when their conference sold out a month prior to the conference; and, they had a decent size waiting list too.

 

I was helping out Josh Adams (@jladams97) our Sales Engineer for ColdFusion.   Josh was speaking at the event and needed help at the Adobe table.  And as it turned out, there were several Adobe User Group Managers and their members there.  The community aspect was great, but what is this Mura stuff? They were at MAX, but I’d never heard of them.

WHAT is MURA?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mura is a CFML based Content Management System (CMS) that was created by Blue River Interactive Group, a full-service interactive agency based in Sacramento, California.

Blue River was founded by 3 guys who played in Sacramento area rock bands.  They wanted to find a simpler way to update their band websites.  So one thing led to another and they developed a flexible web based content management system.  They’re young, agile, and they have got some great clients.

1. Continue the dialogue with your users; plan for MuraCON 2012.
2. Identify influencers who know your technology well, and then invite them to meet Mura staff offsite.
3. Discuss with your influencers, how they might get involved in forming meetups and speaking about your technology as “outside evangelists”.  (They key thing is they have to feel so passionate about your technology that they will do this evangelizing on their own….they can’t be paid or else they lose their street credibility)
4. Then start thinking about how Mura might engage and recognize them publically.  Community Spotlight? A Speaker session @MuraCon2012? Perhaps then, set up a User Groups or a “Champions” program…..centered around these influencers. Things will build from there.
5. Next Mura will need to think about hiring a Community Coordinator/Manager to help them with event planning, social media outreach, and other engagement opportunities.

I hinted further that a great place to look for community folks is at the Community Leadership Summit or CLS-West (in So. San Francisco).

A good book to read is Jono Bacon’s (Ubuntu Community Mgr) book: “The Art of Community“.

Here’s a video below of Jono talking about the rise of communities in corporations/foundations.

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MuraCON Attendees

• Scott Sloan aka “rubbergumball” will be synching-up with Sean Corfield to be the new leader of Bay Area ColdFusion User Group http://www.meetup.com/bacfug which meets at the Adobe building in San Francisco. Thanks Scott for stepping up and helping BACFUG to remain officially in the Adobe User Group program.
• Sean Walsh from Inland Empire CFUG http://www.iecfug.com  – I had a long conversation with Sean, we naturally talked about doing a joint developer event in Southern California amongst several So. California Adobe User Groups.
• Steve Farwell from the Orange County ColdFusion User Group http://www.occfug.org

Will there be a West Coast ColdFusion Event in 2012?

I certainly hope so! The guys from Mura could probably do it with additional sponsorship.  Adobe will likely be there, but all depends on how things are organized!