Last year I mentioned that JBUGs are really important to us and that we were starting to make some changes to improve the way we work with them. Well I can now announce some more things that are happening around JBUGs.

For a start we are launching a series of JBUG leader calls with the JBoss core teams. Initially due to timezone constraints this will be restricted to North America, Latin America and Europe, but I hope we can offer this around the world soon. The calls will be at 12pm Eastern on the first Monday of each month, and each call will include a JBUG-focused technical presentation about some topic of interest, previews of things to come etc. During the call the JBUG leaders will be able to tell us what else we can do to help them out as well as ways in which they can collaborate. At the moment JBUGs rarely get to help each other, so we'll be looking at some online forum or mailing list where they can chat and tell each other what works and what doesn't work.

What qualifies you as a leader? Well if you regularly help in putting together a JBUG then you're a leader. And it doesn't matter if you are a JBoss/Red Hat employee either - you can still attend.

The first meeting is on the 5th of March (yes, it's close!) And in that call we'll be talking about AeroGear. The next meeting, on the 2nd of April, will be about the JBoss Developer Framework and DeltaSpike. And during that meeting we're planning on providing some discounted access to JUDCon for JBUG leaders, so you definitely don't want to miss it!

So how do you get involved? Well first of all you should sign up to the JBUG pages. Next you should start to follow the @JBossUG on Twitter. That account will provide us with a way to communicate. Hopefully everyone will find this a useful start to more improvements we'll be making to and for JBUGs in the near future. So come and get involved and help us shape this future.