Scott Canham has recently taken over INETAA -- IAA initiative as the new Product Manager. He forwarded an INETAA internal email around, but I figured I'd post it and look for feedback from the community en masse.
Here are my current thoughts on the IAA pilot program. Let me know what you think and please add anything if it comes to mind.
I'd like to run the pilot program from Oct 1 to Dec 31 with at least 3 groups.
This should give us enough time figure out:
- What kind of user groups work well
- What industry contacts work well
- What user groups and industry need in terms on communication
Main scenarios:
- User groups working on projects looking for help from industry on specific issues
- User groups looking for inside information related to their projects
- Industry contacts looking for user groups to provide cheap labor/research labor
Industry contacts looking to build recruitment relationships with specific user groups and universities
I think it would be good to get user groups with an emphasis on several different areas. By this I mean we should try and find active groups that are focused on general .NET topics as well as groups that are focused on ASP or DirectX. I believe that if we diversify IAA groups and types of industry contacts we will have an easier time matching groups and we will see better results.
The challenge is going to be in identifying user groups and industry contacts for our pilot program. To do this, I think we need to leverage the contacts some of us already have, so if you have some groups or industry people in mind speak up right away please :) Also, perhaps we can get some assistance from Microsoft Developer Evangelists, Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelists and INETA pro-devs? Thoughts on this?