First Formal Meeting
by bobdoyle
Posted on

The first formal meeting of the CM Pros Massachusetts Community took place on June 28th. The Community held an informal meeting in May led by David Pearson who initiated the community and pulled together the steering committee. David filed the required paperwork with CM Pros Executive Director Laura Walker and it was approved and her "Call for Participation" to all members was sent on June 9th. In attendance at the meeting were:

• Jesse Burkhardt
• Bob Doyle
• Seth Earley
• Heather Hedden
• Craig Andrew
• David Pearson
• Renaud Richardet
• Anthony Wilson

Heather, Renaud, Jesse and David

After a review of the importance of the Massachusetts Community many thought the next step was to poll and survey Community members. We will start with using surveys to determine the date and times for meetings. Day and time questions. There was also discussion around having a way to track top things. For instance what are the top topics. Lists of the most popular topics on the list serve. Would you be interested in discussion leaders. Are people interested in topic/theme based meetings. Anthony Wilson, a new CM Pro member, thought it would be a good idea to have an aggregator of the things both the Massachusetts and broader CM Community are talking about.

David Pearson spoke with some detail regarding recent communications from Bob Boiko, the first President of CM Pros, to establish a video link between this years summit in Boston and the DesignIT Conference in Tokyo. Bob is also the author of the "Content Management Bible". Everyone agreed that with this years theme for the summit of "Globalization" that an interactive component using the latest video and collaborative tools would make a lot of sense. David who is also the Summit Event Coordinator will be working with Shinohara Toshikazu, CEO of SocioMedia in Tokyo, and with CM Pros Board Member Mary Laplante and Vice President Scott Abel on integrating this component into this fall's Summit program.

One thought that received considerable support was to have Theme meetings that lead to roundtables for the Fall Summit. It is clear from looking at the Spring Summit Evaluations that a more collaborative and interactive format is desired by the membership. Roundtables would accomplish this request. Renaud read the survey questions. David agreed to develop an initial Steering Committee survey and Community membership survey.

Heather mentioned the importance of establishing links with sister organizations in Boston. The group noted the importance of this in general as well as specifically looking at companies in the Boston atea involved in globalization who might want to support the summit as attendees or sponsors.

It was requested that all Massachusetts member names be added to our community page. It was further decided that there would simply be a link to the Member Directory and any qualified user could then click to the Directory and view all the member names in the Community.

There was also discussion around the possible development of an off shoot of "CMS Idol" An opportunity for Vendors to be critiqued "Buzz Word Bingo". A Vendor Clinic. One idea of a format was to have 3 vendors and give them each 5 minutes to make their pitch. Based on the judgement of those performances one would be chosen to go on for 20 minutes.

Endeca a company that does guided navigation was mentioned as a possible Summit Sponsor - It was decided that David would meet with Anthony to follow-up on this possibility. That meeting is scheduled for July 13.

Feel free to add your own comments our notes to this blog. If you should happen to have any questions on how to do that feel free to shoot me an email or give me a call. 617-532-1906

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