A Fond Adieu to LA Flash

As I've now announced, this December's LA Flash meeting will be my last as manager of the group I founded almost seven years ago. As this feels like a particularly significant move, both for the group as well as for me, personally, I wanted to take a few moments to explain why I feel that the time has come to move on from my post in active leadership of our community.

First, I should begin by explaining that it has been an amazing opportunity and privilege to have been in the position to found and build from scratch LA Flash -- what has become the largest Adobe User Group (AUG) in the world, with over 3,000 registered members. As a Jersey native, Los Angeles is my adopted home, and one of the aspects of life out here that I find so rewarding is the extreme degree of creativity here in this city. Every city has creative people, creative work, creative neighborhoods, but in Los Angeles a sense of creativity seems to permeate so many aspects of the entire city -- particularly so in places such as Venice, which has been LA Flash's home for over four years. And, while LA's Flash community may not be as sophisticated on the engineering front as that in other cities, LA's mixture of animation shops, ad firms, interactive agencies, and tremendous freelancer community breeds a unique perspective on working with this technology.

Around 2002, after struggling with my freelance career for a few years, and learning the ins-and-outs of working in Los Angeles, I realized that while all cities can benefit from improved community, a city as disparate as Los Angeles really required a community to serve as a platform for talent to build connections, get work, build their careers -- and for us to build an industry. When I sought and interviewed for work, I had to explicitly explain that 'no, I'm not a web designer; I'm a Flash developer' and then, of course, I'd have to define what that meant -- and, more often than not, they didn't really get it. Potential clients would ask 'can Flash really handle this?' and 'isn't Flash just sort of a messy joke?' Instead of selling myself and my services, I also had to sell the idea that Flash was a real technology worth using. Things are tough enough when you're a freelancer; you can't handle educating an entire community on your own. And if no one else was going to step up, I figured I should -- as I was a full-time graduate student at UCLA, and working full-time as a contract Flash developer, assuming the responsibility of creating and running a group was perhaps only slightly insane.

So, one day in early 2003, I emailed Macromedia, bought the domain name, and the rest just sort of took its course from there.

All along, I've had two goals: first, to contribute to the establishment of a well-defined and mature Flash industry here in Los Angeles, through education and networking; and second, to do so for no cost to the membership.

Along the way, eschewing the traditional model of an Adobe user group, we've experimented with the type of events we run. Not satisfied to run regular meetings, and exploiting the awesome Almer/Blank warehouse here in Venice, we've run several events each year that feature unique line-ups and entertainment. This effort has culminated in the development of LAFlashapaloozastock (which we've run four times, the two most recent produced by FITC) -- what is, in all honesty, one of the best Flash events in the world, and is always free to the community. But, we don't need the excuse of a special event to provide great content -- even our regular monthly meetings have top-notch speakers, both from our region (including individuals such as Jon Ruppel, Andrew Keegan and Troy Gardner, among others), and from the broader industry (Robert Reinhardt, Joshua Davis, Grant Skinner and Colin Moock, to name just a few). We've also frequently hosted our meetings online, using Adobe Acrobat Connect -- opening up access to our content to an audience who otherwise couldn't attend. And we've given away tens of thousands of dollars worth of software to our members.

In short, I've worked hard to provide great content, and great experiences, to our community, for free. And, in return, before I had an agency, or even anything of a name, LA Flash helped me establish both. And I've built a fantastic network and learned a tremendous amount about community leadership in our city -- what works and what doesn't; what people respond to well, and not so well.

Which leads to the question of why I'm stepping down, and why now.

In the course of LA Flash's existence, our industry has matured -- significantly -- and as such, I feel that the original mission I set for myself is no longer relevant. I started LA Flash to help professionalize and mature our industry. And, while the process will of course continue, I think we've reached a point at which things can be said to have matured. Today, I no longer have to explain to clients what Flash is -- instead, clients approach us already knowing that they want Flash work, and Flash is widely respected almost as a standard akin to HTML and JavaScript. Whereas a few years ago, big ad agencies that might have had one 'Flash guy', today those same firms support entire teams of Flash developers (with discrete and specific skill-sets within the Flash Platform), while other firms who were essentially start-ups when LA Flash was created (such as Schematic and Blitz and Userplane), are now well-established successes. Many of my fellow freelancers whom I knew at the start of LA Flash -- people who, like me, couldn't afford to rub two dimes together at the time (including Jennifer '30-Second-Bunny-Theater' Shiman, the Influxis boys and Samuel Asher Rivello) -- are now well-respected and successful members of the industry. It has been a really tremendous experience to come up in the industry along with such a dynamic, creative and cooperative set of individuals as our Los Angeles region has fielded. But, as our industry enters this new phase, I think our community needs to shift gears accordingly, and it's an appropriate time to shift management who can oversee the community through this new phase of our history.

At the same time, as will likely not surprise anyone, running a group isn't always easy -- at times it can be quite draining. Thinking of and communicating with speakers, scheduling meetings, dealing with sponsors and maintaining the site all add up. Because I've always run LA Flash as a non-revenue generating enterprise, all of this effort is uncompensated. As well, as the number of user groups around the world has significantly increased, Adobe has unfortunately been unable to increase support for the user groups correspondingly. And, Adobe does not scale support based on the size of the group -- LA Flash (7 years old with 3,000+ members) gets as much support from the Adobe User Groups program, as would a 12-member group in the middle of North Dakota. So, as overall support for user groups has diminished, I (along with a few others who run large groups) have felt a particular pinch due to the perverse incentive that punishes success -- allocating the same resources to all groups, despite their size.

As a result, while we owe the budgets for our special events to our sponsors (who have included Artisan Creative, 24 Seven Talent, Aquent and Match Creative, as well as Adobe), LA Flash would not have been able to operate on an on-going basis and produce our content and events, had it not been for the constant support of my two firms, Almer/Blank and the Rich Media Institute -- always providing a great facility for our events, as well as the time of my team members and a discretionary budget for basic items. This de-facto underwriting of LA Flash by my businesses increases my personal burden associated with running the group.

While the requirements of running LA Flash have increased along with it's growth, so have those of my personal career and life. When I founded LA Flash, I was a freelancer. Now I run an agency (Almer/Blank), a training company (the Rich Media Institute), I regularly travel to teach and speak at conferences, and write for various outlets. I'm also engaged. As my capacity utilization rate approaches 100%, I've had to face the fact that I can not afford to spend the amount of time on LA Flash as I used to. And I'm not the only one. Many of the original members of LA Flash -- the ones who showed up at each meeting for our first few years -- have also become too busy to regularly attend our meetings. So, while overall meeting attendance remains stable, there is an increasing amount of turn-over, and there are fewer and fewer regulars. The increasing absence of familiar faces has, unfortunately, further reduced my desire to invest the required time into LA Flash.

Finally, I've continually experimented with the model of events that we run here at LA Flash -- just as KCRW is a unique version of NPR, I'd like to think that LA Flash is as unique an Adobe User Group. But, there is only so much I can do within the confines of a product-specific user group. The experience of running LA Flash has shown me the types of events I'm truly interested in running -- not standard user group meetings, but instead events more like LAFlashapaloozastock (combining talks and education, with live entertainment and parties). I'm currently working on establishing a platform that will allow me to throw these types of events, which I hope to begin running in 2010, so stay tuned!

Before signing off, I would like to doff my hat to those of you who have given, above and beyond, to help make LA Flash the brilliant resource it is. Over the past seven years, there have been many people who have contributed their time to make our group and our events shine -- too many for me to name here (with too high a risk that I'd miss a whole bunch of you). But, in particular, three members of the community have stood-out with their outstanding and generous contributions of time and resources to the benefit of the community.

• Leslie Wintner, whom I met at the very first LA Flash meeting, who is my current co-manager, and who has managed our group library (including all publisher relationships) and authored our newsletter for years before that
• Elliot Mebane, who became involved in the group almost immediately after he showed up at our first meeting, first by creating and running the 'crit' -- sessions to have the community critique your work -- and later, by managing a second user group under LA Flash, the LA Flash eXtension (LAFX, which became LA AIR before dissolving)
• Stephanie Warner, who for years, was effectively my co-manager (when co-managers were not formally recognized by Macromedia), and helped me setup and run many of our events in the early years (and who was a vital part of assembling the very first LAFlashapaloozastock in 2005)

And, though he is not a member of the community per se, the effort of Jonathan Menendez (whom I met and hired as my first intern at the first LAFlashapaloozastock, and who is now my personal assistant at Almer/Blank), has been vital in permitting me to continue running LA Flash these past few years, as my workload has increased.

And so, with that, it is almost time to say goodbye (I'll do so formally, on December 2nd, at 7P). But, of course, this is not the end of LA Flash -- indeed, it is the beginning of a new phase in the history of LA Flash, in the hands of fresh and energized leadership, two of my talented employees at Almer/Blank, Omar Gonzalez and Harald Koebler.

I would like to thank you everyone who was ever, in any way, involved in LA Flash, even if it was only by attending one meeting or writing one forum post. Communities only ever succeed if they exist; my role has been to serve purely as a catalyst. Los Angeles has a fantastic community, and that's how something like LA Flash can happen. Over the past seven years, we've all been a part of something that has been really unique and special -- it's been like a seven-year long Flash mob! -- and I thank each and every one of you for making that happen.

The manager is dead; long live the manager!

-r