OpenNTF Elections
It's the time of
year when we invite anyone interested in participating in OpenNTF's Board
of Directors to submit their names to ip-manager at openntf.org.
Employees of member
organizations may be nominated as a Member Director – with a two-year
term. There are five such board positions open for election.
Contributors may
be nominated as a Contributor Director – with a one year term. There
are three such board positions open for election.
The following
Member Directors' terms expire this year. They may, of course, run again
for another two year
Serdar Basegmez,
Developi Information Systems
Adam Foster, Oval
Jesse Gallagher,
I Know Some Guys
Christian Güdemann,
Webgate
Douglas Robinson,
Prominic
The terms of the
three Contributor Directors expire this year. Again, they have the
option of running again. They are:
Padraic Edwards
Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Election schedule:
Nominations open
until September 23rd
Circulation of
Candidate Statements September 24th
Voting from September
24th to 29th
The winners take
office on Oct 11th
OpenNTF at ICON UK
This week it's ICON
UK in Birmingham, UK. OpenNTF will again be in attendance. In addition
we will again be sponsoring the beer (and other drinks) at SpeedSponsoring
on Thursday 13th at 5pm. With Domino V10 just around the corner and Connections
Customiser available for a year, now is a great time to get involved in
open source as a contributor or consumer, providing code, reviews, documentation,
or verification on current software versions / platforms. There are plenty
of opportunities to get involved and put open source at the heart of ICS.
So if you're interested in learning more about how you can get involved
or what we're involved in, talk to one of the board members at ICON UK.
Domino V10: Get Involved As A Project Contributor for OpenNTF
With Domino V10 just
around the corner and a commitment already announced at Engage from HCL
and IBM to work with OpenNTF, there is no better time to get involved.
It may seem an onerous task and there may seem more administration than
necessary around contributing to OpenNTF. The measures in place are designed
to give greater confidence to our consumers while minimising the work involved
for contributors. It's actually quick and painless. There are just four
steps:
- Register on
OpenNTF, if you haven't already. If you're not going to be uploading the
releases, you don't even need to do this.
- Sign a CCLA (if you're contributing
on behalf of your company) or ICLA (if you're contributing
as an individual). This just gives you and consumers of your project peace
of mind.
- Add a license
file to your project. Hopefully your project is Apache-licensed, where
possible. The text is here or you can copy
from another project.
- Add a Notice
file outlining who's contributed code and any third-party code you've used..
If you're concerned
about the ICLA / CCLA, I've created a video on our Facebook page to step
through it as well as give an overview of the whole process.
Plus we have our
board member elections in September. Whether on the board or not, we're
always looking for people to get involved in all areas like process management,
infrastructure management etc. The more help we have, the more we can do.
So get involved
and look for more opportunities over the coming months.
OpenNTF Welcomes HCL as a Member Company
At Engage we were
proud to announce that HCL had completed the process to become a member
company of OpenNTF. It has always been great that IBM, as product owners,
supported OpenNTF as a hub and community for open source. And it was no
surprise that HCL were also willing to support OpenNTF's mission. We look
forward to many interesting open source announcements as we move through
Domino 10 and beyond.
OpenNTF at Engage and Contributors
Last month the
Paul, Christian, Serdar, Nina, Martin and Nathan represented the board
of OpenNTF at Engage. Unfortunately Nathan wasn't in the photo. But it
was a good opportunity for us to meet up as well as catch up with both
IBM and HCL. There are a number of initiatives in the planning and starting
to mature. HCL announced a commitment to open source with OpenNTF, becoming
members - more to follow on that. And there were plenty of sessions led
by OpenNTF board members. The board will also be well-represented at the
Golden Ticket event at HCL's labs in Chelmsford MA next month. And the
upcoming release of Domino 10 will open up many more opportunities and
potential for a new audience to benefit from IP management and project
governance improvements that we provide, to make OpenNTF much more than
just a source control repository.
As part of those
project improvements, shortly before Engage we sent out an email to contributors
to get feedback on their projects. We've already had some responses and
the first open badges have been issued to those contributors. If you are
a contributor and have not been able to reply yet, please do so. Particularly
with Domino 10 around the corner we want to be able to promote the key
projects available.
If you wish to
do a video or guest blog post to highlight a project, those are also welcome
and please reach out to contributions at openntf.org.
Domino Is Evolving, Call For Action from Contributors
The board has just
sent out the following email to contributors, which we're cross-posting
on a blog to catch as many people as possible.
Dear
Contributor,
First there was Lotusphere, then IBM Connect, then IBM ConnectED, then
IBM Connect again, now IBM Think.
First there was the Notes Client, then Domino HTTP and servlets, then XPages
and mobile, now NodeJS and Loopback are coming.
Domino 10 is around the corner; Domino2025 is already evolving.
The world of Domino app dev has changed and is constantly changing, and
we know OpenNTF's project portfolio needs to change to stay current too.
Please take a moment to quickly update us on the projects you maintain:
- Project Name
- Status (Active, Complete, Not Working, Superseded by...)
- Target platform (Server only, Notes Client, Web, Mobile)
- Minimum and maximum Notes/Domino versions, if applicable
- Other active project chefs (to avoid everyone needing to reply!)
- Remove me as project chef / I'm looking for additional help with... (e.g.
documentation, testing, etc.)
We will be promoting active, current projects over other projects, to help
our users going forward. If you are still an active project chef, you'll
also be awarded one of our new Open Badges as a contributor plus a staged
Open Badge for being involved in a certain number of projects. The Open
Badges initiative at OpenNTF already started last year with the OpenCode4Connections
contest and will be extended to consumers as we try to increase the numbers
of reviews on your projects.
Thank you for your time,
OpenNTF Board
We want to reiterate,
we're not planning on removing projects and this is just a first step.
We want to make it easier for consumers to find useful projects and reward
our contributors. We want to help build an ecosystem of contributors around
projects and transfer projects, where appropriate. And we want to be more
ready for the future. This will require some additional work behind the
scenes, we know, some of which has already been done with staged badges
for contributors. But it will enable us to be a better hub for existing
and new Domino developers.
If you are a contributor
and did not receive the email, please respond to contributions at openntf.org.
Congratulations, Paul Withers!
With great pleasure, the OpenNTF board likes to announce the latest achievement of one of our board members, Paul Withers, who was awarded the IBM Lifetime Champion on last Sunday at the IBM Think conference in Las Vegas!
Paul does a great job over the years in the community being one of the core members of OpenNTF, the Extlib and ODA developer tribe and a frequent and reliable creator of highly valuable blog posts regarding all things ICS, XPages, Java and technology overall.
"The IBM Champion Lifetime Achievement award recognizes an IBM Champion who stands above their peers for service to the community. Over multiple years, these IBM Champions consistently excel and positively impact the community. They lead by example, are passionate about sharing knowledge, and provide constructive feedback to IBM. The Lifetime Achievement award provides automatic re-nomination into the IBM Champion program for the duration of the program, plus other benefits."
Paul was awarded along with other great people that we also want to mention:
- Roberto Mazzoni
- Alex Ivanov
- Tiago Moura
- Pete Massiello
- Stuart Litel
- Klaas Brant
Congrats again to you all - keep up the good work!
Open Badges Updates plus Website Changes and Fixes
Over the weekend
we announced two new open badges available for those who run user groups,
There is one that's generic for OpenNTF and one that's for OpenCode4Connections.
If you run a user group and would like either or both of these badges,
please contact Paul Withers (you've almost certainly got one social media
access route!).
We're aware there
have been issues recently posting discussions, defect and feature requests
via the website and for a bit longer replying to any of these. Some work
has been done over recent days that should have resolved all those issues
now. The refactoring has been part of more significant streamlining in
the design, particularly around registration, password management and account
maangement. In time this will be extended further into capturing last login.
As ever with a site as long-running as OpenNTF, there are a large number
of old and possibly redundant accounts but currently no way to identify
them. This work will eventually allow us to manage the infrastructure better.
No significant changes will be occurring in the short term and we will
keep you apprised.
For the same reason
we will soon be reaching out to contributors to try to identify current
active projects. There will be a number of projects where the main project
Chef no longer works with IBM technologies, where the project has been
abandoned or superseded. This will allow us to keep the list of main projects
fresher as we go forward. This may mean we reach out for people to take
over projects, if they wish them to remain active, but rest assured nothing
will be removed without notice.
Updates To OpenNTF Website Content
Today we pushed up
some changes to the OpenNTF website. The previous area "IP and Legal"
has been split down into "IP" and "Legal". The Legal
area covers legalistic documents for aspects such as our bylaws, IP policy,
privacy policy etc. If you're looking for practical content about the IP
process and how to apply it, you should look instead at the IP area. A
lot of the content here has been restructured or slightly reworded to better
explain why we do it, why you want us to do it, and do make it less daunting
to implement. It may seem scary if you've not done it before, but in practice
it's very straightforward and our IP Manager Jesse Gallagher will help
you through any typically minor amendments, if they are needed.
Hopefully we've
updated all links within the site, but if you spot any or have ideas for
any improvements, please let us know either on the OpenNTF Slack chat or
posting to our @OpenNTF Twitter account.
OpenNTF on Twitter
When the free non-production
Domino server license was launched on developerWorks
earlier this year, it brought that area of developerWorks to the conscious
awareness for possibly the first time. I looked at the "Communities"
sub-page and, in particular, the "Social" area near the bottom
on the right. That highlighted that there were Twitter feeds being publicised
that were not being maintained. That needed addressing.
CollaborationToday
has a team curating the content that appears there in a variety of categories
and the Home Page of OpenNTF has a widget that displays new releases. There
is content that could and should easily be blogged by @Collab2day and
@OpenNTFProjects. But we're all busy people
and we endeavour to work smarter. There are tools to automate posting to
a Twitter account and one of those that I've been using since the end of
last year for various integrations is IFTTT.
For those who
haven't used it, IFTTT allows you to set up "recipes" which will
perform some action based on something else occurs (IF This
Then That). Two of those endpoints are an RSS feed and Twitter.
So for a few months now we've had various recipes so that if there is a
new feed item, IFTTT will automatically post a tweet. But CollaborationToday
includes a variety of categories and few will be interested in all categories.
So to make the tweets more useful and more informative, there are different
recipes for each category, adding a prefix to the tweet depending on the
RSS feed category filter, as you can see below.
You can see the
result below:
Currently there
is no RSS feed for new project releases, so that is proving less straightforward
to automate. But obviously that's feasible, it's just going to take some
custom development.
UPDATE:
As a duplicate tweet just reminded me, I also set up an IFTTT recipe for
the main OpenNTF account to automatically tweet new stories via the OpenNTF
Blog RSS feed. The lesson to learn is automation is great until you forget
what you've automated!