My name is Todd Rafferty and I have agreed to step up as Volunteer Community Manager for getrailo.org. I have been doing CFML for about 10 years now and my passion for creating applications hasn't faded since I started. If anything, another year brings on bigger and better challenges. This year brought me Railo as well as other exciting news that is shaking out of the CF Community.

Why volunteer to be a Community Manager?
I recently commented (read: complained) to Sean Corfield when he had just joined Railo that Railo's lack of documentation and pulling things together in one cohesive spot is really hurting. He brought the feedback to Railo team and he also put the ball in my court, "Are you volunteering?" I thought about it for a week before I finally agreed to. Railo is one of those projects I'd like to see succeed as I believe there's enough room for everyone. Railo is another very interesting tool in my vast web development toolbox.

If you don't already know, there's a very active community growing on the Railo Google Groups ( http://groups.google.com/group/railo ) and documentation is also being looked at ( http://groups.google.com/group/railodocumentation ). I've already been pulling together a new FAQ section on getrailo.org and it's going to keep growing as we go along!

On Thursday evening, after the first full day of sessions at cf.Objective(), Brian Meloche interviewed Gert, Mark, Peter and Sean for his CFCconversations podcast. Brian made sure to ask us some of those hard questions that I know have been coming up in the community around Railo's intentions. I hope you enjoy this relatively short podcast (42 minutes) and I hope it answers some of the questions you may have about our new organizations in the UK and the US. If you have questions and you're here at cf.Objective(), come along to our Birds of a Feather session at 3pm in the Nicollet C room where Gert, Peter and myself will open ourselves up to Q & A from the community!

Gert, Mark, Peter and Sean will all be at cf.Objective() 2009 this week. Mark, Peter and Sean are all speaking (on non-Railo-specific topics) but all four of us will be available to answer any questions you have about Railo as well as the support and consulting packages that we offer. I expect you'll be able to find us in the bar every evening - and the opening reception on Wednesday evening - but we should be easy enough to find wherever we are throughout the conference! cf.Objective() promises to be an awesome conference and we're all looking forward to the great sessions and to meeting everyone and hearing your Railo success stories!