I'd like to take a few moments to introduce myself and the new role in which I'll be working for Digium to further the Asterisk project and environment. As you may know, Digium plays a key part in assisting with the development of the Asterisk project, and so I am pleased to be working for them in a full-time capacity as "Asterisk Open Source Community Director", replacing the talented Jared Smith who has moved over to do customer training and bootcamps in order to bring more people into the quickly-growing Asterisk environment. My job as Community Director is to know the members of the development community outside of the Digium staff, to understand the issues and work towards harmonizing (or at least listen to) the various opinions on code issues and roadmap concepts, and to function as an interface between Digium and the large group of coders who appreciate and contribute to Asterisk. The work that Digium does on Asterisk is of great value to the community (and almost inversely, Asterisk is of great value to Digium) but Digium is only a portion of the equation - we (Digium) need to work to continue to integrate the code contributed by the community, the concepts brought to us by users, and to resolve the problems that may arise with the rapidly changing areas of complexity in which Asterisk is now proving to be essential to the telephony applications market. There is much still to be done! Digium can only provide a portion of the effort - it's up to the rest of the community to create the rest of Asterisk.
I'll also be taking on a number of other tasks which are less obvious to the community, such as assisting with the content of Astricon, the premier Asterisk event (September 23-25 - plug, plug - www.astricon.net) - if you have ideas on content or talks, please let me know. We've collected a set of potential speakers - if you've already talked to Julie Webb, you're on the list. If you've got an interesting talk for the business or technical aspects of Asterisk, let us know! We'd love to hear you speak in Phoenix. I will also be trying to monitor the mailing lists, IRC channels, and various blogs about Asterisk - but I also suspect I will not be able to keep up with the huge volume of information that is generated every day. If you have specific concerns or discussions, please feel free to reach out to me directly - my email is [EMAIL PROTECTED], and I will read all messages and I hope that I will be able to reply to each as well, even if I don't have an immediate solution or knowledge of your request. While I am happy to function as a sounding board for complaints, I will also tend to focus a higher level of effort on those issues which represent some way of increasing the ability of the community to help itself, versus requests that simply ask for something to be created/fixed/modified. Asterisk is open source, and is developed by a community - if you're reading this, you're a member of the community, and my job is to try to make your efforts more effective. A bit of background on me: I've been working with Asterisk since 2003 (arguably 2002) and I've worked with dozens of companies either as a consultant or in a few cases as a full-time Asterisk wrangler. My work has mostly been in the service provider areas, and I'm quickly coming to learn more about the "solutions" space, and your insights on this will be interesting learning as I move forward. I've spoken dozens of times on Asterisk or Asterisk-related topics, I've been to all the Astricons, and I've written quite a few articles on Asterisk - but all of that experience is actually quite small in the face of the huge number of possible permutations of what people in the community have done, and I am constantly surprised by how Asterisk is being used. Part of what makes Asterisk such a great platform is not only the depth and capabilities of the code, but the enthusiasm, knowledge, and constant work by the community of people around the world who use Asterisk for themselves and for their business. When Mark Spencer started Asterisk, he didn't start another PBX company - he started a telephony revolution. Development on Asterisk became a vision of a toolkit that was to be extended by thousands of individuals, all working on the same project to complete their own goals. It would be used by application developers, service providers, systems integrators, hardware hackers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises - all of which would have the ability to develop and contribute their code back to each other with Digium as the hub of activity. I hope that I can continue the work that has already started to keep Digium as a sponsor and advocate of the Asterisk platform, and I'm looking forward to my tenure in this position. JT -- -- John Todd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Asterisk Open Source Community Director _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users