Nice to see that the fund raising for Chris turned out good. Chris has now more or less received the $1250 he needed to be able to attend the Macromedia DevCon. (Check the initial posting if you are interested in the background for the fund raising)

Chris has promised that he will be making the speech available online. Either as just plain speakers notes, or perhaps published together with audio from the speech. I hope he decides to include audio recording from the speech - I am sure that would be a success.

To Macromedia: Please reconsider your policy for the DevCon conference in the future. It would be nice to feel that Macromedia as a company shows appreciation for the hard work put down by community people such as Chris.

I have received several e-mails from disgruntled Flash community members that either turned down a chance to speak at the DevCon conference or are attending the conference as speakers with less than good feelings about it. Some of the information in these e-mails have really shook me up more than the fact that Macromedia failure to pay the cost for the speakers to attend the conference (we are talking travel and stay here, nothing else). Unfortunately I am sworn to secrecy about who these people are and what they have told me.

But I must say I am amazed at the degree of abuse these speakers are willing to take to be speakers at the event. If anyone should boycott DevCon, I now think it should be the speakers. By allowing Macromedia to short-pay you as a speaker and treat you the way they are doing, you as speakers are really selling yourself short. I just hope that other big Flash conferences won't see what Macromedia is doing as an opportunity to start treating their speakers bad.