I realize that many of you are in regions that, on initial consideration, might not seem fertile ground for a user group.  You may feel that being located in a smaller metropolitan area or rural region is an insurmountable roadblock to getting a group started.  What’s the point of holding a first meeting if there’s no one else around?

Your first step is finding the 2 or 3 or 10 people you can connect with and agree to meet in person. We’ll get into the meat and potatoes of managing the group later; there’s no point talking about it until you’ve got enough interest to fill at least the seats around a kitchen table or bar booth. Finding people is, admittedly, hard.  Luckily, there are plenty of online resources to datamine for prospects.

I ask for forbearance from those of you for whom all of this is painfully obvious.  It’s not obvious to everybody, and this suite of blog posts is oriented to those at the beginner/intermediate stage of social networking (remember: user groups were perfecting social networking when Twitter’s founder was still in diapers).

FileMaker(!)

It would make sense to start here, wouldn’t it?  I would humbly suggest that if you’re serious about starting a user group, it would behoove you to contact your regional BAM (Business Account Manager).  BAMs are chiefly concerned with getting FileMaker into medium to large sized corporations – that’s their job – but they have a vested interest in seeding fertile ground with the FileMaker brand.  If you don’t know who your BAM is, find out.  Call FileMaker.

FMPug

fmpug.com is the defacto clearinghouse for most FileMaker User Groups around the world.  It’s really in your best interest to contact Andy or Heather at FMPug and ask them if they know of anybody in your region who’s approached them in the past about starting a group.  There may have been earlier attempts – and the initiators of those attempts should be your first prospects.

FileMaker specific prospect resources

Next let’s talk about the large, FileMaker oriented searchable directories and forums.  You’re going to want to search for folks in your city/county, neighboring areas, and so on.

The FileMaker Consultant Search Page – These are generally people who are fulltime FileMaker developers in one sense or another – either large businesses or sole proprietors.  If anybody’s going to be interested in FileMaker, these folks are it.

FMPug Business Directory – FMPug.com has its own member directory which is worth searching.  While most members belong to local chapters, there are also “Virtual Chapter” members – people in the FMPug community who, like you, are too far from a physical group.  Check to see if there are others in your area and start networking.

FindFileMakerDevelopers.com – Like the FileMaker Consultant Search page, but with a different set of search tools and more comprehensive profile information in the listing results.  The two sites don’t overlap 100%, so don’t forget to search both.

fmforums.com – If you haven’t joined this site, you should –  even if you aren’t trying to set up a group.  This is the oldest and largest online forum dedicated to FileMaker around, and is extremely active.  Post a solicitation to the Chit Chat forum thread.

filemakertoday.com – Ditto with FileMaker today – joining both forums has immeasurable value to you as developer irrespective of whether you get this user group thing off the ground.  Same deal: post your intentions, and solicit feedback.

Other online Directories

Okay, let’s say for the sake of argument that you’ve exhausted all of the above resources.  What next?

Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook.

Google

Hm.  Can we just assume you know how to use this?  Please?  No?  Then try Google with training wheels.

LinkedIn

If you don’t yet have a profile on LinkedIn, set one up now (mine’s here).  It’s indispensable, and an excellent calling card to boot, if you’re looking for work.  For networking /research purposes, it’s a great tool.  There are quite a few uses you can make of it to search for user group prospects:

• Keyword searches
• People searches
• Question/Answer searches
• Group affiliations (and networking through them)

I’m not going to get into all of them, but will just throw up keyword searching as an example.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m trying to set up a group in Nebraska.

A simple keyword search for FileMaker

Searching for FileMaker…of course

yields 18000 results:

Not too shabby!

I can then filter by location – I see 1084 listings in Boston.  Well, that’s nice, but I’m all the way over here in NE. I can manually key in a search for Nebraska, and I now see:

10 is better than nothing

Lincoln, Nebraska: 10.  One of the core concepts of LinkedIn, by the way, is that you can only see the full profiles of those who are in your network (by being connected to someone who is somehow connected to you).  For me, only one of the contacts in Lincoln is connected to me.  He’s connected to me through 3 current FileMaker employees, though, so definitely someone I would want to consider contacting if I were starting a group in Nebraska.  If I were I an actual NE resident, I’d likely be connected to more than 1 of those 10.

This is where it starts to get to be about networking.  Let’s say I contact this guy, tell him of my plans, and ask for referrals to other people who might be interested.  He is much more likely than I am to know people who may be interested in what I have planned.

The interesting thing about this – and where LinkedIn really expands on the pool of prospects – is that it’s keyword searching on profiles that have FileMaker listed anywhere – it’s not just the bigwig consultants, it’s power users, business owners, IT people, data entry folks…everybody who has had a stake in FileMaker somewhere in their careers.

Next up:

Twitter

I have to admit I’m a reluctant Twitterer.  It’s not because I don’t like the medium per se – it’s more that opening TweetDeck, for someone who can’t wash dishes and hold a conversation at the same time, is a rabbit hole of “multitasking” distractions that leave a gaping half hour blank void in my workday.  I launch, do my minimum bit, and exit as gracefully as I can, before any of the glittering feeds tempt me.

That said, I highly recommend exploring Twitter simply because it’s one of those rare places where you can toss a random 140 character question like: “I’m in Bangor ME, want to start a #FileMaker user group.  Interested?”  and get answers (and a half dozen spam follow requests) in five minutes.

Do it, even if you hate it.  Just remember you can always pack Twitter away, a rarely used tool.

And, of course, if you find you don’t hate it, you may discover that there is a thriving FileMaker community on Twitter. It’s real, and it’s worth exploring in itself.

Facebook

I’m one of those who keeps my life fairly compartmentalized.  My FileMaker life lives here on phillyfilemaker, and on LinkedIn, and FaceBook is where my personal and art life is more comprehensively represented.  I’ve found that it’s really different for everyone; it may be that FaceBook is the ideal platform for you for what we’re trying to do here.  It comes down to personality type and comfort levels. Anyway, where FaceBook shines – and why it may make sense for you to exploit it for this purpose – is that it’s the epitome of social networking.  You could set up a FaceBook page for “The Bloomington/Normal FileMaker User Group”; you could join FileMaker specific groups and post questions to their walls…there are myriad possibilities here.

Okay, time for a search / social networking break.

At this point I’ll make couple of random observations:

• Continually expanding your search should be your MO; be promiscuous in your efforts.
• Look for local community gate-keepers: you want that person who can act as the hub who will lead you to other prospects.
• This whole User Group search sounds a lot like job hunting, doesn’t it?  And it smells like sales and marketing too.  That’s not a mistake.  You’re selling your idea and trying to obtain buy-in.  The only real difference here is that your currency is mindshare rather than cash.
• The corollary to the previous bullet point is that you need to learn sales skills.  Don’t worry, it won’t hurt a bit.  And picking up the confidence to build a User Group has dividends in other areas of your professional life.

That’s it for now.  I know, all you Social Networking wonks are yawning by now anyway.  This blog post was not for you

In the next installment I’ll do my best to cover the tools and services you should try to add to your toolkit to start and manage your group.  I’ll cover:

• FMPug affiliation
• Mailing List management (Mailman (FMPug uses this), FileMaker, FMSpark, MailChimp, etc)
• Event listing services
• Blogs and websites

Some of this will be my version of “best practices”, some will simply be observations about what completely failed for us

I’ll open the floor here: anyone have any other ideas they’d like to add or comment on the topic of finding group members?  Or any other thoughts?

Group Coordinators: What did you do when you started your group?  What were your learning experiences?

- Colin

In this first installment I would like to simply lay out some simple terms, so we can all speak the same language.  A rosetta stone if you will.

First, let’s talk about what Drupal is.

What exactly is Drupal?

Drupal is a framework that lets you build a web site with dynamic content.  The web site happens to be built using PHP and the database is MySQL.  But you don’t really need to know that to get off the ground.  Drupal, like its cousin WordPress, is a tool to build websites.

Im not a PHP or SQL expert how can I understand how to use this tool?

As a FileMaker developer, I typically think in terms of Tables, Fields, Relationships and Layouts.  Drupal has some of these things but they are not named the same.  Let’s mark out some places where these FileMaker terms have analogues in Drupal.

Drupal is a essentially a content management platform.  Content comes in different types.  A content type is similar to a FileMaker table.  On the default Drupal installation there are two content types: Pages and Stories.

Let’s take the default installation as an example.  You can think of this set of two content types as a two table file, in which each table contains two fields: title and body.  It’s possible to add more fields through the CCK (Core Construction Kit) module, but you always have the two ‘default’ fields to start with.  You can also add more Content Types.  Need to track Authors?  Make it a Content Type.  You can also enable a number of basic definedContent Types (Forum, Poll, Book Page, Comment, Blog Entry) that are disabled with the default install.. Just like using FileMaker, the purpose of the database will dictate the form that the database takes.  A Drupal site will be dependent on the purpose.  For a company that sells books, you might see the following content types:

• Books
• Authors
• Salespersons Blogs

For a community group you might see these content types:

• Members
• Committees
• Teams
• Group Blog (i.e. What’s New)
• Committee Minutes

The big message here is “Content Type” is like a FileMaker Table – at least conceptually. Put in more generic ERD terms, Content Types are Entities. Don’t be misled by this, however; if you look at the back end database a Drupal site creates, you will not find a Books table or a Members table.  All of this is abstracted away.  It is important to use the Drupal Tools provided, until you know what you are doing.

Next Steps

Over the next couple of entries I am going to demonstrate the power of this platform by building a simple web site for a fictitious store.  Our web site will have products listed and a Blog section.  The features include:

• Users of the site will be able to browse and search a product catalog.
• Users of the site will be able to read a blog where specific products are highlighted.

Once this is built I will show how to make simple links from the ‘public facing’ web site to a ‘back end’ FileMaker database.  The database will pull in product info from the FileMaker database.

Keep an eye on this blog for future installments!

Learn how to design applications and interactions that your users will rave about, skills that cannot be outsourced, and practices transferable to any software development platform – from two veteran DevCon speakers.

For more information about this seminar, including cost and registration, click HERE!

I started thinking about this series of posts (yep, this is #1 in a series) after a few conversations I had with people at this year’s FileMaker DevCon.  I’d strike up a conversation with someone at lunch or at the bar, we’d exchange stories and experiences…and inevitably the talk would shift to why people come to DevCon in the first place.

Reason number 1: for the community.  Hands down.  The clear pleasures and advantages of meeting other people who are engaged in the same practice as you – with whom you can share ideas, learn from and teach –  always trump session topics, what’s on the lunch menu, what kind of swag you can haul back, or how many banners you can affix to the bottom of your convention badge.  One of the things that’s sometimes lost when you do a hand count of how many people in the room have iPads is how many people in the room are there because of the other people.

I’m going to go on a tangent here for a moment to talk about human behavior, and will come back to those DevCon conversations a little later.

We’re advocates of Agile development methodologies here at IT Solutions.  One of the core statements of the Agile manifesto is: where possible, value individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  In the context of Agile development, that statement helps emphasize (and leverage) the fact that software is built by humans working together.

I happen to love that statement, though, because I believe it’s not just a statement about development workflow.

It’s an observation about what really motivates us as humans.  Our monkey brains are social.  Our emotional and social batteries are recharged by engaging with each other.  Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, IM, blogs, websites, email, Basecamp, and everything else that we use as proxies for social interaction offers us myriad opportunities to recharge those batteries, at recharge rates proportional to bandwidth.

By far, though, the highest, most optimized bandwidth available to us is face to face, in person contact.  You can live stream and tweet all you like, but I can guarantee I can communicate more in five minutes with you in person than I ever could online.

This is why DevCon matters.  We all know it; it’s why we go.  To be with our particular sub-tribe of humans, speaking our own language.

This is also…

Why User Groups Matter

All right, so maybe I’m biased, because I run a user group.  Feel free to bump the font size down a few notches in your mind.  I will say that more often than not, the conversations I had at DevCon would eventually shift to what kind of local resources were available for whoever I was speaking with.  Who was in their area?  Who could they network with?

And especially…was there a FileMaker Developer Group nearby?

At this point the conversation went one of three ways:

• There was one, and it was awesome
• There was one, kinda, but it was an hour away
• The nearest one was in the next state or country

With the second and third responses, the tone was either wistful or frustrated.  I’ve had a bunch of conversations like this in the past, and my reply has always been: “Start your own!  It’s easy!”

Which probably glosses over things pretty badly.  For one thing, starting anything is never easy.

There’s the risk involved with investing time and energy into something that has a good chance of never getting off the ground.

There’s the open question of whether or not anybody will be actually interested enough to come.

There’s the “qualifications” question that some people ask: “Why me?  Who’s going to come to a group that I start?  What, am I special or something?”

No, you’re not special.  But you can start a User Group anyway.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts I’m going to put out in the next few weeks providing some key concepts and advice on how to start a group and how to grow it.  I’ll be covering:

• Initial tools and frameworks for managing a group
• Finding group members, marketing the group and building a community
• Finding speakers and topics

I’ll get into FileMaker-specific concepts in places, but by and large this stuff applies to anyone looking to start a technical user group.

That’s to come.  For now, if you’re really interested in starting a FileMaker User/Developer Group in your area – or finding one – your first stop should be to www.fmpug.com.  I’ll be talking about FMPug as a marketing and organizational tool in a future post, so won’t go into detail here.  Just take a quick look now.

What qualifies me to give advice?

I’m not special either  But I have had some experience building communities.  We’ve done a lot of hard work over the years to build Philly FileMaker into a large, robust group, and have learned some lessons along the way about what works and what doesn’t.  We want to share that.  And when I take off my day job hat, I run an art gallery with my wife, Mount Airy Contemporary, which has been a community-building exercise in a very similar way.  And when I take off my gallerist hat, I’m an artist, and engaged with promotion and community-building around that as well.  And when all of those hats are safely stowed, and I’m back at work, I promote training opportunities for IT Solutions, as well as work as a full time FileMaker Consultant.

This stuff matters to me, in short.  And I want to talk about it.  I want to see the FileMaker community expanded and enriched through local efforts.  I want more of you folks out there starting groups today. This’ll be my little contribution to that effort.  Feel free to comment along the way.  If you’re a group coordinator, especially, and have your own advice to add, it would be most welcome.

Colin

Coordinator
Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

www.philllyfilemaker.org

Our next Philadelphia FileMaker User Group meeting has been scheduled for Tuesday evening, August 24th 2010 at 6:00 PM.

The meeting will be held at the IT Solutions Fort Washington Office:

+  414 Commerce Dr., Suite 150, Fort Washington, PA 19034
+  Full Google Map: http://bit.ly/d7L05o (or just mess with the inline map below)

As always, pizza and soft drinks will be provided.

Please RSVP here if you are planning to attend this meeting:
http://www.fmpug.com/rsvp.php?eventID=1078

2010 DEVCON RECAP

Presenters: Jason Mundok, Chad Sager, Colin Keefe

The fifteenth annual FileMaker Developer Convention was held August 15-18 in San Diego CA.  We’ve just gotten back and can’t wait to share.  Come join us for a discussion of FileMaker GO, new techniques and technologies, and a general roundtable talk.

Jason Mundok will share his experiences, interviews and quotes with a video mashup of the week.

Chad Sager will discuss the sessions he attended and his impressions as a first time attendee.

Colin Keefe will review some SQL techniques he picked up from several sessions by Michael Lee at DevCon.

Anyone else who attended and feels moved to speak is welcome to come and share your stories!

About the Speakers

Jason Mundok is a Project Manager at IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.  Chad Sager and Colin Keefe are Senior FileMaker Consultants with the firm.

IT Solutions is a Platinum FileMaker Business Alliance member serving the Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware region, as well as servicing clients across the U.S.  ITS has seven full-time Certified FileMaker developers on staff and works in other development platforms, such as .NET and Salesforce.

IT Solutions is a FileMaker Authorized Trainer, offering training opportunities using the FileMaker Training Series curriculum for advanced training and internally designed curricula for beginner and intermediate offerings.

About the Philadelphia FileMaker User Group

The Philadelphia FileMaker User Group was founded in 2004 as an initiative by FileMaker Business Alliance Platinum member IT Solutions Consulting.  The group’s goal is to provide an open forum for FileMaker developers and those interested in FileMaker to meet, brainstorm and network.

We hold meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month at 6PM, in the office of IT Solutions Consulting, Inc., at 414 Commerce Drive, Suite 150, Fort Washington PA.

Meetings are open to all, regardless of background and there’s no charge to attend.

Please subscribe to our Mailing List to get announcements on upcoming meetings. The list is set to Announce only, so the volume is typically between one and 2 emails a month.

http://fmpug.com/mailman/listinfo/philly_fmpug.com/

You can read our blog to get updates and meeting recaps:

http://www.phillyfilemaker.org/

Twitter here:

http://twitter.com/phillyfilemaker

We’re also an FMPug Chapter:  http://www.fmpug.com/ Consider membership today, especially if you purchase training, plugins, 3rd party products, or web/filemaker hosting – FMPug membership affords considerable discounts across a range of offerings.

About Our Sponsor

Finally, The Philadelphia FileMaker User Group is hosted by:

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.

Employee ownership – fueling our innovation, strengthening your business.

http://www.itsolutions-inc.com/

- Learn about our new FileMaker support offerings: FMAssist and FMAssure!

- www.itsolutions-inc.com/our_solutions/application_development/fm_assist.html

Download Lee’s demo from the keynote at savvydata.com.

August 24th, 6 PM, DevCon Recap, at the usual location:

IT Solutions Consulting, Inc.
414 Commerce Drive
Suite 150
Fort Washington PA 19034

We’ll be recording this one this time, not streaming it, mainly because we’ll be using Jason’s fancypants camera and mike.  If you liked the quality of the latest rash of 5 Minutes with Philly FileMaker videos, you’ll like the next meeting recording.

For DevCon folks this year – safe travels and see you next year!

- Colin