We're happy to announce the launch of a new community effort, cfpanel. The premise is pretty simple: a semi-regular, somewhat informal 30-60 minute meetup led by 3-5 community members to discuss relevant topics in a live forum. We plan to conduct the sessions via Connect and will invite viewers to attend and listen/participate in the discussions. We'll have a weekly high level topic, but plan to keep it less structured and more flexible - we'll let the discussions go wherever the audience wants it to for the most part. Right now the plan is to broadcast the panel discussions weekly on Tuesdays at 12:00pm EST. We understand that we have a global community and we are considering a rotating schedule that will accomodate our international friends, but our first few sessions will stick to this time slot.

We think this effort presents a unique approach to podcasts in the Adobe RIA developer community. Being live and unscripted will allow the panelists to speak candidly on the topics they feel strong about - and we'll do our best to pick panelists who will bring unique and possibly opposing positions on the topics that we will discuss.

A large reason why many podcasts seem to lose momentum is that they require a lot of work. There is pre/post planning along with countless hours of editing. A live forum will minimize the editing and hopefully enable us to stick with a regular schedule of fresh content without spending time on editing and post production.

Todd or I will always try to attend the sessions for moderation purposes but our goal is for this to be a true community effort. A new group of panelists every week keeps content fresh and you the listener caught up with whats going on in our world.

Each week we will post an entry in the Episodes category that will give you the details of the meeting. We will post the date and time of the meeting along with the panel members and topic for the week. We encourage developers to attend these sessions live and we will do our best to accomodate feedback and live questions as they come in.

After the session is over we will post an entry in the Episode WrapUp category that will contain show notes and a link to the recorded version of the session so that people who are unable to attend the live session will have a chance to view it at a later time.

We'd like to thank everyone on the CFBloggers list who gave us feedback prior to our launch. We really appreciate the encouragement and willingness to help and participate. Feel free to give feedback here, we're looking for suggestions on topics and volunteers to sit on the panel. If you want to sit on the panel all you will need is an internet connection, a microphone and an opinion.

Check this post for info on our first session.