Community Rant

It's been a while since I have written been busy with trying to do some new things with Map3D and got my new Motorola Droid so had to transfer my life to that.

Well, This week a lot of people are headed to Vegas for AU2009 . Even more will be looking online with AU Virtual . This brings me to my question or rant about the community of users.

There is a huge community of users for every Autodesk product. Most of these people use the discussion boards to ask questions and get answers. It really is an amazing tool in that thousands of people will take time out of their lives just to help you with your problem. The questions I have is can we do more. Is there a next step. EE has down a good job of trying to create a platform for discussion, chat, and Q&A. While I see lots of people registered for the site I don't see much participation. Why?
I have create a social media site through Ning but that hasn't lead to much discussion either. I've been involved with my local reseller in trying to get a users group together and every meeting has less and less people attending. Maybe they feel it's a pitch since it's through the reseller. I don't know. In this down economy are people really all that busy? To busy to network and get free help and advice?

I know there are local user groups that are active. They seem to be more on the architectural side. Are architects more social than engineers? Is there a secret key or formula?

Back.

Sorry about the missing in action. I deleted the blog. Yeah I know dumb move. Well I would like to change the blog a little anyhow. Something to make it a little more personal to me.

So what has been going on? Started a partnership with Joshua Modglin. Josh is the coding brains behind the EE propacks. He also has done a lot of other projects and specialized tools for AutoCAD, LDT and Civil3D. We are trying to get things off the ground. Seems to be going well.

What else. I've been taking a little break from Civil3D and playing with Map3D a lot. I think there are a lot of unexplored uses for that program. Currently working on some traffic and transportation type application.

All this while trying to homeschool and keep up with 5 kids. Never a dull moment. I'll will mostly be posting my technical post over on civil3d.com. Special thanks to James on giving me that privilege.