Thanks to everyone who attended this week's AGM, particularly on the feedback. Here are the minutes and the slide deck.

Attendees:
Board: Paul Withers, Christian Guedemann, Nathan T Freeman, Corey Davis, Martin Rolph, Martin Donnelly, Oliver Busse, Jesse Gallagher, Fredrik Norling, Serdar Basegmez, Peter Tanner, Justin Hill, Mikael Orn

Members: Bruce Elgort, Frank van der Linden, Marky Roden, Devin Olson, Dave G., Padraic Edwards, John Roling, Declan Lynch, Martin Jinoch, Doug Robinson, Pete Janzen, David Leedy, Mike McGarel, Tony McGuckin, Brian Gleeson

1.        Meeting called to order
 
2.        Introductions - OpenNTF Board and Committee Heads
All board and guests were introduced
 
3.        Chairman's Report
Site views are at 60k and although submissions have slowed, the quality has increased. Extension Library is back on 6 week release cycle, and now also on GitHub, with pull requests being incorporated.

OpenNTF is now using the Atlassian suite, to improve the process, more on that later.

OpenNTF is currently sponsoring beer at user groups, to raise our profile. That will be reviewed at the end of the year.

OpenNTF will also aim to build communities around topics, rather than starting from code.
 
4.        Financial Report
OpenNTF's revenue model is based solely on advertising from OpenNTF.org and xpages.info. The revenue we get for contests from business partners goes directly to those contests. Any smaller contest, OpenNTF tends to pay ourselves.

Corey circulated the revenue figures for the last 12 months and forecast for the coming 12 months.
 
5.        IP Working Group Report
This year has been a quiet year, with no changes in IP or governance, which is good.

Contributors up 33 from last year. About 60% are from IBM or GBS, the rest are from smaller / independent.

GitHub has been used more and more for project repositories, which is good.

The have been no serious IP issues. Some contributors say they usually get things right first time.

Christian advised that we are looking to build an IP group, so additional members of that group are welcome and should be forwarded to the Board.
 
6.        Technical Committee Working Group Report
There has been lots going on this year, including a server upgrade moving from Windows to Linux with improved resilience. Thanks to Prominic.NET for their work.

The website is now more stable as well, despite over-eager crawling by Bing, which caused some issues.

The Atlassian quite has been installed by Prominic.NET and existing OpenNTF credentials can be used. All active users automatically get JIRA access.

Over the coming year OpenNTF intends to extend branding across the other OpenNTF sites, as well as moving XSnippets to Bluemix.

Content has been updated and went live last night, but OpenNTF is committed to keeping it fresh going forward. On that topic, we would like reviews of projects as well, so we can do shout outs on the blog.
 
7.        Process Report
OpenNTF are looking to make process changes, as we're seeing more large projects being released, more Java rather than NTFs and more expectations now around what constitutes good practice in open source.

The first step was implementing the Atlassian Stack - Stash for source control, JIRA for issue tracking, Bamboo for Continuous Integration, Confluence for collaboration and documentation. OpenNTF recommends SourceTree for developers.Part of the reason for Atlassian was that Atlassian gave OpenNTF free licenses because we are an open source community.
Currently OpenNTF credentials for active users give access to JIRA. For Stash, we need specific repository management, so please contact the IP manager. Repositories are easy to have in multiple places, it's just like Notes replication, so this should not be a difficult move. Confluence is currently in progress. By year end we hope to have automated releases. Documentation is due out by the middle of May.
 
8.        OpenNTF Conference
OpenNTF is considering running a conference in 2016. This will be a global conference, very technical and aimed at being inclusive, so not focussed just on IBM technologies. OpenNTF are aiming at Q1 2016, as a three-day event, with $495 ticket cost. Exact dates and location are still under consideration.

The conference will be slightly different to historic events, so a TED-style track of shorter presentations. It will also be digitally-enabled using a conference application that does more than just agenda tracking. OpenNTF are looking at different sponsorship mechanisms rather than just booths. And there will be more unconferencing, with tables for spontaneous discussions. It would be independent of IBM, but we are aware that IBM are a major member of and contributor to OpenNTF. We would very strongly welcome their involvement, but are not necessarily looking to them as the major financial contributors. The conference's target audience would be more technical and middle management than higher managers, to try and minimise any complict with conferences like Impact.

We would like feedback, on when, where, sponsorship interest, speaker interest etc, because this would be a major financial undertaking. Please email conference@openntf.org.

There was positive feedback about the idea, but strong ideas about a schedule would be wanted as early as possible. A question was raised about speakers going free, but no decision has been made on that at this time, it may just be a reduced ticket.
 
9.        Open Discussion
OpenNTF are looking at new membership models and our ideas will be presented during June 2015.

The Chairman thanked members for their support, contributions and consuming of projects.

Posted by Paul Withers At 1:58 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, Thursday, April 23, 2015 from 11am-12pm EDT (4pm-5pm BST, 5pm-6pm CET), OpenNTF will be hosting its Annual General Meeting (AGM). The meeting will be held via a teleconference. For audio, the dial in numbers are listed below. There will also be slides shown, and these can be accessed via the web conference https://apps.na.collabserv.com/meetings/join?id=5732-2975.

Here is the agenda for the meeting:

Agenda:

1) Meeting called to order

2) Introductions - OpenNTF Board and Committee Heads

3) Chairman's Report

4) Financial Report

5)  Technical Committee Working Group Report

6) Marketing Group Report

7) IP Working Group Report

8) OpenNTF Conference

9) Open Discussion

10) Adjourn meeting

Country Toll Numbers and Toll Free Numbers:

AUSTRIA 43-1-92-86-505
CANADA 888-426-6840
CHINA* 86-400-810-4763
GERMANY 0800-000-1018
NETHERLANDS 0-800-363-6036
USA 888-426-6840
USA   Caller Paid 215-861-6239
United Kingdom Caller Paid 0-20-30596451
United Kingdom Toll-Free 0800-368-0638
Denmark   Caller Paid 32711870
Denmark   Toll-Free 80-717000
Sweden   Toll-Free 0200-125807

More country numbers: https://www.teleconference.att.com/servlet/glbAccess?process=1&accessCode=71387162&accessNumber=8884266840
 
Participant Passcode:   4753487

Posted by Paul Withers At 4:49 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we've launched the new content pages on OpenNTF. For some time we've been conscious that much of the content was rather out-of-date. So there were a number of aims when updating the content:
- Remove out of date content
- Re-format content so it is better designed for web and mobile browsers
- Change the navigation so that all pages are accessible from menu options

The last aim was key. The historic content has been added to over a period of time and, when we looked at all the pages available, a lot were only accessible from other pages, making a site map difficult to understand. So we've added a two-tier menu, with sections of pages grouped together. So, for example, About Us has a set of pages appropriate for that.



We've also ensured the menus still work on smaller form factors, like so:



We also intend to review the content on a regular basis and we already anticipate a number of changes over the coming months.

Any feedback and suggestions for enhancements will certainly be welcome.

Posted by Paul Withers At 4:39 PM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)

As the developers close in on a long-awaited M5 release of OpenNTF Domino API, Paul Withers has created three blog posts showing how to use XOTS to write Java code in your NSFs that can run background and multi-threaded tasks. Already functioning for those use cases, the next step is to enable it for scheduled tasks, which would allow developers to finally to replace LotusScript or Java agents and use a single set of code for the whole of their XPages application.

The posts are all under the category of XOTS on Paul's blog.

For those unfamiliar with XOTS, here is a portion of Paul's introduction:

"OpenNTF Domino API has provided a number of significant enhancements. One of the more recent is XOTS. As its name suggests, XOTS brings together XPages and DOTS....However, the limitation has always been that an NSF may have specific business logic in it, but the DOTS task had to live outside the NSF, so could not share the same Java code. There was no way to code once and apply to threaded / backend tasks. Furthermore, there was no functionality for scheduling tasks. So agents had to be either ported to LotusScript or coded in Java with a third copy of business logic and utility classes (because XPages Java code cannot be used in Java Script Libraries or Java agents). XOTS is intended to address these issues"

Posted by Paul Withers At 9:33 AM Location | Permalink | Comments (0)