Welcome, new curators!
When I posted the „help wanted“ call for new curators last week I never expected this great feedback. Within less than 24 hours I was offered help from 5 people of our community.
First let me say a huge THANK YOU to all who offered help. We greatly appreciate you interest in moderating interesting content on CollaborationToday.
During the next 2 days after the call I onboarded Andi and Heiko who already moderated some posts. You see it‘s not that complicated to do this.
Stay tuned for more content and again thanks alot for your help!
CollaborationToday Needs You
Collaboration Today, the news aggregator around anything HCL related content (fka IBM), social business, collaboration and community events needs your support: we are looking for curators to moderate content, blog posts and news around our beloved platforms like Domino, Connections, Sametime, DX, Nomad and other products from HCL.
We, the curators (Johnny, Kenio, Roberto, Matteo and myself), appreciate any help from our great community.
It's actually quite easy to moderate content on Collaboration Today. If you want to help us please contact me or any of us CT mods via support@openntf.org.
Thank you in advance!
Preparing for the Future of OpenNTF
OpenNTF has grown organically for nearly twenty years. In that time, we have accumulated a lot of projects and a lot of entries in our directory. Just as the platform and the types of projects have evolved over that time, so have our members. Usernames are tied tightly to email addresses, meaning if people move company they accumulate logins. That is also true for contributors, which means logins may no longer be correct, because our contributors are more likely than most to have moved companies. And some of those contributors have moved on beyond just changing companies, but changing technologies, so they're no longer working actively with Domino.
This provides a challenge for being up-to-date and as secure as we would like.
Thankfully our friends at Prominic are able to identify who has logged in over a period of time. This allows us to identify which logins are active and which are not. So we'll be using that over the first three months of this year to enable us to clean up our data and provide better services across our infrastructure. At the end of that period, any users who have not logged in over the period will be purged.
That does not prevent those people registering again. It also does not impact authentication into OpenNTF's Slack - that is managed within Slack itself.
But it will allow us to better identify where a project no longer has an active project chef.
So if you want your login to OpenNTF retained, please log into the site before the end of March. We will be reminding people regularly in the meantime.
New Categories on Collaboration Today
Collaboration Today, your daily news aggregator, has been updated. We adjusted categories for all news around HCL Collaboration Solutions. We cover Notes and Domino, Connections, Leap, Sametime and DX as well.
If you are a reader, please update your RSS feeds. If you are a moderator, please check out the new categories for posts. If you are here just for reading, enjoy the separation of the upcoming curated news about all new products and topics within HCL CWP.
Any feedback is appreciated! Join our Slack channel or contact Collaboration Today directly on support@openntf.org.
Collabsphere 2019 OGS
Collabpshere 2019 has opened and Graham Acres spoke on behalf of OpenNTF at the OGS.
Graham explained how we are working with HCL to ensure that OpenNTF can support more than just the traditional areas we've been involved in. With OpenCode4Connections we have had a microsite and GitHub repository for some time that has supported Connections resources. And OpenNTF itself has been a repository not only for developer-focused tools but also admin tools, as with the Easy Admin Tools project. We have historically also had Sametime projects and, with the re-emergence of Sametime in V10 and V11, hopefully there will be a renewed focus on Sametime projects.
To enable this, we plan on making some amendments to the projects and releases areas of the site, to enable greater granularity than we've had in the past. Some of this has been in discussion for a while, via the rather small Project Steering Committee and the board. Anyone open to getting involved in this are welcome to contact any of the board members through the OpenNTF Slack or other social media areas.
OpenNTF is still committed to supporting community events, contests and hackathons. And you can expect to see board members visible at many events, maybe more than ever before with Paul Withers joining HCL. I'll take this as an opportunity to remind anyone involved in user groups that we have an open badge available for our community group partners.
Graham also pointed to our Confluence wiki, specifically the nascent Community Guides area - thank you to Roberto Boccadero, Thomas Hampel and Daniel Nashed for the first guide on Domino on Docker.
One other area Graham announced was a new Sandbox server that OpenNTF will be making available, thanks for Prominic, in the near future.
As always, we are looking for people to get involved in all areas. The board is responsible for deciding the way forward, but in our past we have also had specific steering committees for infrastructure IP and more. For OpenNTF to expand across all of the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio, we will need that again in time. And it's never too soon to start. Documentation is a big area and we have had specific spaces on OpenNTF's wiki for certain projects. In more recent years GitHub has provided GitHub Pages for projects, so some projects may prefer that. There are always small useful integrations that could be developed, standalone, like integrations into Slack or GitHub - and no doubt many others we've not thought about. If you want to get some experience, do a bit of personal training around that, and are interested in contributing some functionality for OpenNTF on a specific area, let us know. And there is the #new_ideas channel in OpenNTF if you think there's a project that would be beneficial. We can promote it to help try to form a team, give you a space to discuss scope of the project whether you're wanting to coordinate the project, develop it, do documentation, testing, or just have an idea.
OpenNTF is here as a resource to support the community. This community has always been key to the products, but a community is only as strong as its members. And if the Digital Solutions products grow as we want them to do so, the community and OpenNTF needs to grow as well.
Announcing the New Board of Directors
It's a pleasure to
announce the new OpenNTF board. We already have five Member Directors who
still have one year left on their tenure:
Christian Güdemann
Adam Foster
Jesse Gallagher
SerdarBasegmez
Doug Robinson
The following
Member Directors have been elected to a two-year tenure starting this year:
Paul Withers
Dan Dumont
Oliver Busse
Graham Acres (moving
up from Contributor Director)
The following
Contributor Directors have been elected for a year:
Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Howard Greenberg
The new board
will take up their positions on 3rd October, when we will also elect the
Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary positions.
Call for Nominations for OpenNTF Board of Directors
With Social Connections
just around the corner and the Collabsphere
agenda recently announced, it's the time of year when we issue
our call for directors.
There are four
Member Director posts up for election this year. Any employee of a Member company
is eligible to apply and the posts run for a two-year term. The following
Member Directors terms are currently expiring:
Martin Donnelly
- IBM
Paul Withers -
Intec Systems Ltd
Oliver Busse -
We4IT
Nathan T Freeman
- Red Pill Now
The terms of the
three Contributor Directors are also expiring. Anyone with an ICLA or CCLA
can apply for the post, which has a one-year term. The current incumbents
are:
Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Graham Acres
Anyone interested
in standing submit their names and a candidate statement to ip-manager
at openntf.org.
The election schedule
will be:
- Nominations
open until 20th September
- Voting from
21st September to 27th September
- Winners take
office on 3rd October
Collabsphere 2019 Beauty Contest
Yesterday Richard
Moy announced a new contest
to provide a modern user experience for DMA to a traditional Notes template.
After contest
in recent years for Connections Customizer and XPages, now is the right
time to engage with LotusScript and Formula Language developers and re-energise
that community around open source.
There are many
developers who never made the jump to XPages and may not make the leap
to the App Dev Pack. But IBM and HCL's launch of DMA has brought an additional
entry point to Notes Client applications. HCL's work on iPhone and Android
(tablet and phone) DMA apps with expand that reach across the two main
mobile platforms. And with V11 the lightweight client is likely to bring
Notes Client applications to any modern browser. Applications built with
traditional design elements, LotusScript and Formula Language can have
a greater reach than ever before. And OpenNTF is still here ready to embrace
those open source samples to wow users and educate developers.
But most client
applications on OpenNTF have not had a facelift in a decade. And the facelift
given to the core templates is not one that works outside the Eclipse client.
The world has moved on, expectations have changed, and it's time for applications
to modernise as well. Technology is not a barrier to user experience. Just
because it's Notes doesn't mean it can't be fresh, as Theo Heselmans showed
with his Wine Tasting App.
Paul Withers also delivered a session at Engage earlier this year on modernising applications
including adding a DMA interface to the XPages Extension Library database.
There is a blog post going
into more detail.
So while you're
waiting for the template to be selected and the start of the contest, take
a look at these and think about innovative approaches.
Once the contest
starts, there will be people available to act as mentors for teams. And
the template itself will be packaged with the relevant license and notice
files, plus starter markdown documentation file, ready for final deployment
to OpenNTF. If teams want a GitHub repository setting up under OpenNTF
for source control, we can do so. We also advise on issues templates / feature request templates
/ CLA process integration on GitHub.
Engage-ing With Our Community
Nearly half of the
OpenNTF board members were present at Engage - Paul Withers, Oliver Busse,
Jesse Gallagher, Graham Acres and Serdar Basegmez. Hopefully everone had
a good time at the showcase reception on Tuesday evening we co-sponsored
with HADSL. We had a round table on Tuesday morning that was very well
attended, with a lively discussion. In the build-up we posted seven poll
questions on Twitter. Thanks to all who got involved, though because of
technical challenges the questions were only posted during the opening
session of Engage.
The results reinforced
the theme of the round table, that the developer tools that will be used
for development against Domino in the next decade will be different to
those for the last decade. First off, we stated Domino Designer - enhancement
or replacement - was out of scope of the round table. In terms of the rise
of exposure to other development tools, this is already happening with
sessions at Engage on Docker and more. But many have yet to be familiar
with tools and techniques that are standard outside of the yellowverse.
This was reinforced with responses around Maven, Gradle and npm. Although
many had some experience (particularly of npm), few considered themselves
familiar enough. This isn't surprising considering many confirmed they
came from a citizen developer background. There are a lot of educational
resources available, but they are not specifically targeted at our community
and don't provide a simple single end-to-end tutorial taking you from zero
to hero. But there was a strong experience of Java amongst the audience,
as well as for XPages - not a surprise. There will be a lot of interest
in the future Java domino-db module - hopefully integrating with proton
and hopefully available centrally, like other Java SDKs, on places like
Maven Central. In terms of proton and gRPC itself, there seemed not great
understanding of performance metrics vs HTTP. Maybe this explains why so
few have tried the app dev pack and may prefer to stay with more familiar
options for REST services like XPages.
In terms of XPages
itself, the final question to our audience confirmed that many would feel
open sourcing XPages would be something they would welcome, and more than
expected said that they would be interested in getting involved, although
technical knowledge is of course a key requirement. What the future or
best outcome on XPages will be, it's too early to know. PrimeFaces has
been raised by some as a preferable framework, though not widely.
Regardless of
XPages, Java or Node.js, Notes Client development has had a resurgence.
And that option - probably the clearest RADD option - now supports mobile
and, potentially in the future, web through the lightweight client. Sametime
has a renewed focus as well, and it's worth reiterating that OpenNTF has
always supported projects for Sametime as well. Once the deal closes, Connections
is also expected to receive increased focus and we support projects for
that too. It's best to finish our review of the round table with a tweet
from Graham Acres, "We encourage members of the #dominoforever community
to join and contribute. It doesn’t have to be your own idea. Join an existing
project. Write documentation. There are lots of opportunities to help each
other. @openntf at #engageug"
Before we finish,
we would like to wish a speedy recovery to our chairman Christian Guedemann.
OpenNTF at Engage
It‘s probably fitting
thatI’m writing a blog post about Engage sat in a coffee shop, on my iPad,
using Domino Mobile Apps. The last year has brought the product a long
way and one of the most significant new projects has been Theo Heselmans’
Wine App. Admittedly the OpenNTF Blog database is unchanged from the desktop
version, but it’s probably only going to be seen by a handful of people,
so investment is less beneficial.
But to get to
the reason for this blog post, in a little over a week, OpenNTF will be
in attendance at Engage. We’re proud to co-sponsor the Sponsor Showcase
event on Tuesday night, but we’ll also be involved heavily throughout
the event. Graham Acres, Jesse Gallagher, Oliver Busse, Paul Withers and
Serdar Basegmez will be in attendance and happy to speak all things open
source.
We have our OpenNTF
round table on Tuesday 11.45 in R1 called “Developer Tools for the Next
Decade”, hosted by Serdar Basegmez and Paul Withers.
Graham Acres
has a session on Wednesday 11.30 in Room D (Minerva) called “What is Cool
with Domino V10, Proton and Node.js, and why would I use it in my Domino
Apps Anyway?”
Jesse Gallagher
has a session on Tuesday at 16.00 in Room E (Mahy) called “Java with Domino
after XPages”.
Oliver Busse
has a session with Jan Krejcarek on Wednesday in Room E (Mahy) at 14.45
called “The NERD stuff: opening Domino to the modern web developer”.
Paul Withers
has three other sessions.
Tuesday at 17.00
in Room D (Minerva) with Fredrik Malmborg called “Introduction to Node-RED”.
Wednesday at 09.00
in Room D (Minerva) called “Modernizing Your Domino and XPages Applications”.
Wednesday at 12.00
in Room E (Mahy) called “AI - What Is It Good For?”
Serdar Basegmez
has a session on Wednesday at 13.30 in Room E (Mahy) with Tom van Aken
called “Your Data in the Major Leagues: A Practical and Updated Guide
to RESTful Domino v10”.
There are more
sessions that can be named by contributors and helpers of OpenNTF, and
we thank you all for your continuing efforts.