All the speakers at Flashforward 2005 New York are prolific, but when you try to sum up Aral Balkan’s contributions to the Flash community, one thing becomes clear: his coffee is much stronger than ours, and he drinks much more of it.

There’s the usual stuff that would make anyone proud — co-author of a couple Flash books, founder of Ariaware training and consulting company (née Bits And Pixels) — but Balkan apparently takes care of that in his spare time. The other 46 hours in his average day are spent nurturing the Flash community:

• He’s director of the London Macromedia User Group, an organization which attracts many of the top Flash minds to its meetings on a regular basis, and also hosts an online community forum of its own.
• He’s director of Educational content on Ultrashock and contributes many of the more useful tutorials and articles himself.
• He’s a Macromedia Certified Instructor who also writes articles for DevNet.
• He maintains the “What is Flash?” Wiki, a resource site whose most recent success has centered around the use of NaturalDocs for community documentation of Flash. (And a mailing list on the subject for good measure.)
• He maintains Flash Ant, which is not only the RIA blog serving as a hub to all this activity, but also an open-source project to extend Apache Ant for use with Flash.
• He released Ariaware’s RIA Platform as the open-source project ARP at osflash.org/arp.
• And much much more…

But most exciting of all, Balkan has recently helped create a home for all things open-source involving Flash: OSFlash (osflash.org). This is where the action is: phenomenal progress is being made here on multiple fronts on a near-daily basis. Whether you want to participate or just enjoy the fruits of this passionate labor, OSFlash is where you should be spending your time.

With so much going on for Aral, what will he be speaking about at Flashforward? A subject that’s maddeningly difficult to teach well: ActionScript 2: A Visual Introduction for Right-Brainers. An excellent session without a doubt. The question is: will he be coding, blogging, and moderating his kingdom of communities while he’s presenting, or will he take a short break? In any case, with Balkan and many other important figures in open-source Flash in attendance at the conference, you’re sure to see another surge of creative activity.

Oh, and check it out: his avatar can raise one eyebrow. That’s just cool.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 2nd, 2005 at 11:34 am and is filed under Culture, Flashforward News, Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.