Present: Aaron, Paul, Shannon, Peter, Per, Thomas
USA Strategy
Paul is currently the primary evangelist within the USA, primarily focused around his local area. To get the word out about Umbraco the best way he has found is to speak directly to the different user groups in the area.
Using a standard demo which shows off what developers are interest in is a good way to engage the audience, showing off the cool development features of Umbraco. Having a standard development is also useful, as that makes it easier to remember what to talk about each time.
One of the main goals should be to get more people aware of what Umbraco is, not just pushing it as a developer tool.
The best way to achieve this is to start evangelizing about Umbraco. If you are speaking in a passionate manner about Umbraco people are going to believe more in that passion than the demos which are provided.
Courses and Training
Currently Paul is being used as a test case for the concept of franchising the Umbraco training courses. There is still one more course which Paul will be running in the USA and after that there will be a review of the process and whether it was successful or not.
Next Digital, The Farm Digital and Terabyte Interactive would all potentially be interested in doing the support of regional based training sessions.
There is also the idea that online training courses may be achievable. Currently Umbraco.tv has all the videos covering what is in the training course, but the limitation with any online course is there is no way to ask an instructor for the outside the box concepts.
Per is working on standard training material for both the level 1 and level 2 training courses to help facilitate the training from franchised outlets.
What's next?
The next step is to get in contact with the local .NET user groups. At Code Garden 09 we will approach the Microsoft evangelists which attend to see about getting contacts to the region based evangelists/ user groups.
Peter, Shannon and Aaron will also communicate about setting up online sessions which people can attend from all around the different regions, via technologies such as WebEx, Live Meeting, etc.
Once OurUmbraco is released it would be best if we can get something up on the home page (or across the Umrbraco blog) which informs the users that there is a session going to be run (date/ time yet to be determined). The session will be stated as running, not a request for interest, as this will force people who are interested to attend.
There will be persistence regardless of the attendees as there is the expectation of low attendance (at least in the beginning).
A structure of what will be showing in the first/ upcoming sessions will also be provided so that interest can be started, and maintained. If people are aware of what is going to be coming in future sessions they are more likely to re-attend and invite other people to join. Maintaining interest will be a primary focus.
Once Paul has finished the last of the training courses there will need to be discussions around the effectiveness of what he has achieved and whether the franchising of the training course will be practical for each region.