Well, we managed to pull off our first informal meeting. Scott Janousek has posted some photos to prove it. The meeting was pretty informal. Just met and talked about random, generally Flash-related topics. About a dozen showed up, which is about what I expected. Sorry I can’t remember everyone’s name.

Next meeting is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, January 18, 2006, at Adobe in Newton. As soon as I can confirm that the date is OK with Adobe, we’ll make it official. I’ll also find out if someone from Adobe wants to give us some kind of presentation for our first “official” meeting, or if we need to come up with an agenda of our own. A design pattern discussion seemed to be a popular idea with most of the crowd last night.

Thanks to David and Leon and Mass Medical Society for the use of the space. Nice place, if a bit out of the way!

So we have ok for a space to use. It’s at the Mass Medical Society Waltham offices, 860 Winter Street in Waltham. We’ll be in the Charles River Room which is on the ground floor. They will provide some refreshments, and projector if needed. Directions can be found here: massmed.org

We have the room from 6-9 p.m. on Thursday, December 29th, so come on over any time within that window. I think this meeting will be pretty informal, just get to meet everyone and talk about future plans, etc. We’ll schedule an official meeting for January at the Adobe Newton offices.

From Ed Sullivan today:

At this point, I’d like to welcome you into Macromedia’s User Group Program!! From here, all you need to do to remain in the program is continue to meet monthly and keep your website active and updated.

Our first big official meeting will be in January. Adobe/MM will send an email blast to all customers in the area announcing this. We are also listed in the User Group section at Adobe/MM.

As far as the first, informal meeting, we have a possible space available to us in Waltham. Will know for sure soon. Is that convenient enough for people?

It turns out that the Adobe Newton office (it’s hard not to write “Macromedia” there) will be closed between Christmas and New Years, so we can’t meet there. So it might be a more informal meet and greet and a few drinks for the 29th and have an official first meeting some time in early January. If anyone has a good idea on where to meet, let me know, otherwise, I’ll pick someplace.

Welcome to the Boston Flash Platform User Group website. It occurred to a few of us here in the Boston area that there were a growing number of Flash/Flash Lite/Flex developers in the area, and we should probably get together.

Of course, there is already the MMBUG (Macromedia Boston User Group), but with the overwhelming amount of stuff happening on the Flash Platform (Flash 8, Flex 2, AS3, 8.5 Player, OS Flash, etc.) we thought it would be good to have a group devoted to just that. Normally, only one official user group is allowed in an area, but Macromedia saw the logic in this and allowed us to start BFPUG as an independent entity. Thanks!

There were a few steps left to complete our checklist for new groups, and I think this post is going to take care of all of them.

1. We need a URL for the group’s web presence. You are on it.
2. We need to agree to meet monthly. Done. At our first meeting, we will figure out what that exact schedule will be.
3. We need to schedule our first meeting. Done. Thursday, December 29, 2005. I believe we have OK to hold our first meeting at the MM/Adobe offices in Newton, MA, but I’m awaiting confirmation on this.
4. We need to publish the first meeting time on the site. Done.

In addition to this site, there is also a mailing list, which you can subscribe to here:

http://bit-101.com/mailman/listinfo/bfpug_bit-101.com

I’ll post again here, and send a message to the list when we get official word on the meeting place. Hope to see you all there and get this thing kicked off bigtime!

- Keith