We were at the Flex London User Group relaunch on Wednesday night, organised by Mike Jones and Andrew Martin. It was held in the LBi building in Brick Lane. A great venue, fully equipped for this kind of meeting. It was hard to tell exactly how many people were there (I’d guess between 40 and 50) as the room was big and people were spread out, but it was more about the calibre of people than the numbers. There were many industry expert faces I recognised there as well as many I see at PokerCoder.

Mike and Andrew opened the meeting by telling us all about what they hoped FLUG would do and then opened the floor to the community to say what they’d like the FLUG to be. There were lots of valid and interesting requests. My personal favorite being a dance off format for Adobe and Microsoft evangelists to pitch their wares. Like a Presidential debate with beer and weapons. Works for me…okay, maybe that one only happened in MY head, but it’s a good idea right?

I think the group will work very well and the organisers are opening up the forum to employers as well as the community. They want to build a community in which networking is encouraged for the good of all members and the good of advancing the Flex platform in all it’s guises. The Logic Bureau employs this exact same approach so we have to say, we fully support the new Flex London User Group and it’s organisers.

If you weren’t there then get along to the next one. It’s well run, a great venue, the members are friendly and they genuinely want the community to drive the group. This is exactly the right sort of organic approach to get the best out of everyone and end up on the leading edge all the time. I think some really interesting stuff will come out of this group and there’s a definite drive to help developers who are new to Flex to learn from the old pros (that sounded ok in my head). We will definitely be attending FLUG on a regular basis.