I am working with my partner Cloud Elements to build out a community of evangelists, who are interested in delivering on many of the essential building blocks I track on when it comes to API evangelism. I get regular requests from companies who are looking for evangelism and advocacy resources -- in desperate need of smart folks who can help craft content, crank out code, in the service of evangelizing a platform.
The work I'm doing with Cloud Elements, is the early work to help deliver on what API providers, and service providers are needing. Right now we are on-boarding new folks to the concept, and getting feedback on what some of the common elements, and challenges will be. One of the folks I'm engaging with on this is expert PHP and API developer, tech lead, author, consultant and open source maintainer, Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane).
Lorna is one of several folks I've been working with to help deliver on API Evangelist projects ranging from blog, and white papers, to training, and how-to guides. If you are a PHP developer, have been learning about Git and Github in the last couple of years you have probably come across Lorna's work. I was talking to my friend Mark Body on Skype today, and mentioned Lorna and he said oh yeah, I've used her Git training materials before, in my stories and talks -- something I echoed as well, having pointed my readers and clients to her training materials regularly.
After five years of doing what I call hacker storytelling, writing code, JSON, and stories about APIs, I understand how much hard work goes into creating content that is educational and simple, focused on very technical topics like APIs, while also driving search engine traffic over long periods of time. Lorna has done very well these areas,crafting blog posts that will keep being surfaced in Google searches for a long time to come, and help walk people through some very lofty technical concepts--wave after wave.
If you are needing help with storytelling as part of your industry, or API platform, let me know. I'm happy to see where I can help. Feel free to reach out to Lorna as well, she is looking to help the right companies and platforms craft white papers, guides, training and tutorials. If you are an evangelist who is looking to do the same, let me know, and I'm also happy to plug you into the community we are assembling, and see where you can help deliver. If you want to test drive some of first tasks and challenges we have going on in the beta phase, you are welcome to sign up on your own at Mt. EveREST-- things are just getting going, and we could use your feedback.
