Foo Theory is a community of friends and professional colleagues. As stated on the sites splash page: the bloggers and contributing members on this site are consultants, project/product managers and software architects working across the country. Among those we intend to invite to become members work in consulting, commercial software and corporate positions. We intend to only invite people that are widely respected within their professional community and to provide a forum for them to have fun and to feed off of other member’s excitement, knowhow and content. We’ll encourage our friends in the community to share what they know and what they are working on. We also encourage our community’s members to continue to engage in local user groups.
The name Foo Theory (or footheory.com) was the least fun to come up with. Bennie, Erl and me (none of which have any marketing or artistic flare) had a discussion early on about domain names. Among the candidates were foofactory (ok, not really a candidate as it was already owned, though not used, but I liked it a lot), blogcodefactory, codegears, statemachine, blogruntime, jitblog and xplorenet: all good ones. Some guidelines we came up with for ourselves were: the name should be sticky (memorable), tasteful (although entirely subjective) and that it didn’t identify any specific technology (like .NET), as the next great platform may be called .BLAH, in order to remain relevant.
In the end Foo Theory stuck – or was just claimed. It made sense and received a lot of positive feedback from people we polled. What's in the name? As any developer knows: foo is a canonical metasyntactic variable used in "our world" to represent concepts abstractly (ya-da-ya-da)... There was a lot of fun to be had with this name and we felt it could be “sticky”. Some early contributors had some fun suggestions: one was to rate posts with Kool-aid points. Of course the suggestion came without a commitment to develop the functionality - but hey.
It’s important to Bennie and I to make this next point: Foo Theory is not a corporate blog. We want to keep it a forum for individuals and their commitment to the community shall remain personal (no professional strings attached).
The communities’ focus is clear on the home page. On the other hand, we encourage our members to “promote” (within reason) or mention their employer when they feel appropriate and to keep their public professional (Foo Theory) profile up to date. Membership will be by invite only. If you have received this link as part of an invite to the community feel free to forward the URL to your employer and let them know you're engaging with a non-corporate, “un-touchable” so-to-speak community as they can use it to highlight your contribution and content. Again, we encourage this as many of you don’t work for the same company as we do and we feel that this approach is credible. Once you register you'll find among other tips instructions on how to setup automated cross-posting to a personal or corporate blog if you wish.
Bennie and I along with our communities’ members, will moderate content for appropriateness. In the past we’ve removed content with overly foul language and that pushes the limits of professionalism. We won’t tolerate public airings nor will our community be a party for grievances with our member’s employers. I will point out, however, that personal, “off color" and non-technical content is not only acceptable but expected.
We made a decision to use Community Server as a platform for our site. Google “Community Server” or visit their site for more information on the platform. Our Community Server license limits the number of registered contributors without purchasing additional licensing so please contact Bennie and/or Matt before inviting people to become contributors. If you disagree with our decision to not include someone lobby your Foo Theory peers and pressure us: you are the community.
So that's it... We hope you accept our invitation to become a member and look forward to your contribution!
- The Foo Theory Team