The INETA Community Speakers Program went live today. It's a good thing. It means more speakers for more user groups.
I'm not going to repeat all the rules and procedures in this post. You can find the latest info on that at www.INETA.org/Speakers
What I do want to talk about is the reaction I've seen so far.
Mostly quite positive. People seem pretty excited about the announcement, and I think great times are ahead.
On the other hand...In the popular trend of replacing the first couple letters of stuff that happens on Twitter with TW... let's just say there's been some Twitching. If you take a closer look, you'll see that the Twitchers mostly fall into two groups:
1) Previous members of the INETA Speakers Bureau who were quite fond of taking cross-country trips on someone else's dime. Well... some folks get it, some don't. Just because the word "Speakers" was in the title, doesn't mean it was all about them. It's ALWAYS been about the user groups. Some folks forgot that, but this should help them remember. The people that were all about the developer community will keep going, the people that thought INETA was their personal travel agent and vacation planner probably won't. It's win/win.
2) Canadians Currently, the Community Speakers Program doesn't support events in Canada. We're working to change that. I have nothing against Canada. One of my best friends is Canadian. We were given a directive. Microsoft says... here's this money, use it on events and stuff, but dont spend any on Canada because they get funding from us through a different channel.
Well... um, ok. Turns out, that channel doesn't seem to be meeting the needs of the people it serves. So... back to the drawing board. We're working on it... really.
All in all... these are positive changes. The Community Speakers Program will serve the greater community by helping to get more speakers in front of more groups...
Growing and developing the local developer communities is the whole point of User Groups and INETA. If the "twitchers" don't see that, I'm not sure they ever really got the point of INETA in the first place.