First off, the conference was great and thank you to everyone who
participated. We actually has less attendance than the previous OFBiz
User Conference at the sessions, but more OFBiz-related people were
there overall. We had about 1/3 of the committers there, quite a few
people who SHOULD be committers (ie using OFBiz a lot, doing neat
things with it, but just not as involved in contributing back to the
project as they could be... you know who you are! ;) ), and quite a
few people who are interested in OFBiz that we spoke with outside of
the OFBiz-specific sessions (including one of the keynote speakers).
On top of that, and one of the more valuable parts of this event, was
the chance to meet so many of the people who make the Apache Software
Foundation what it is. I've been amazed at how welcome they have made
me feel, and others have made similar comments. The community-driven
philosophy at the ASF is strong, and it is also one of the biggest
differentiators between OFBiz and other "open source" enterprise
systems, which are really corporate driven and are developed in a more
commercial way rather than being community driven. People at the ASF
really get the difference and why it makes a difference, and it's
great to communicate and collaborate with them. Real quick, a special
thanks to Shane, Lars, Delia, Cheryl, and others on the conference
committee who helped make this happen.
BTW, on a side note there was major sponsorship from a few companies
that do work based on OFBiz, including Hotwax, and Brainfood. On one
notable evening (Thursday), thanks to Brainfood, we had a jazz funeral
parade in honor of proprietary software. There was a marching band and
police escort and we even marched down Canal Street for 3 blocks with
the police closing it off for us (that's a major street in New
Orleans, and it was pretty cool), and we had around 150 people marching.
In short, it was hugely valuable and for me it definitely helped to
solidify parts of a vision of what we can do with in this next era of
Apache OFBiz.
Before getting into my more complete notes, it seemed that most of the
discussions at the conference focused around a couple of points:
1. more and better marketing of OFBiz
2. organize ourselves better:
2.a. now that base applications are fairly comprehensive, start
refining and extending based on open standards and community effort to
create a library of business process stories (like the universal data
model OFBiz started with)
2.b. time to eat our own dog food (use OFBiz instead of Jira,
Confluence, etc), and once we get there expand to the rest of the ASF
to replace these tools
Some more detailed notes about things discussed:
Marketing
- new ofbiz home page - pretty and simple
- organize docs better
- docs with marketing/influence intent instead of informational
- promote community model and community-driven open source
- promote empowerment and software to fit the business, without all
the spreadsheets and supplemental systems!
- OFBiz Alliance w/ advertising, required internal use of OFBiz, etc -
We are Open For Business
- Viral marketing campaign, "I am Open For Business" on personal
sites, funny videos on YouTube saying the catch phrase, link to
ofbiz.apache.org
- OFBiz no longer on first page of google search for "open source
erp" (near the top of the second page), and I don't see ofbiz in the
first 10 pages of "open source crm", for "open source ecommerce" we're
on the 4th page
- Google adwords and similar for "open for business", "I am open for
business", "we are open for business", "open source erp" (not paid by
"OFBiz", but rather by interested community members)
Community Organize
- OFBiz Universal Business Process Library
- Mobilize test contributors (testtools, selenium, etc), allow
separate people to be involved in contributing tests and contributing
features (don't require test submission, but if anyone wants something
to work in a certain way, they should submit a test for it as our
normal way of doing things)
- Links from tests to bus proc docs
- Pursuit of open standards - find and document desired standards,
refer to in process library, change service defs to be close to,
eventually implement messaging/etc according to (UBL, OAGIS, XBRL, etc)
- TODO: add XBRL/etc write up to confluence, send email
- Component groups and hierarchy
- TODO: upload diagrams of base apps dependencies, loosely enforced
- TODO: propose goal of framework, base applications, and special
purpose apps layers
- avoid dependencies between specialpurpose apps, push things that
others need to the base applications where cross-dependencies are
natural
- Eat our own dog food
- Content management (replace confluence)
- Project management (issues/requests, tasks, upstream issues
handled by system (ie users promote to OFBiz, OFBiz promotes to Tomcat/
Geronimo/FOP/etc with ASF, ASF projects promote to ?)
- Framework release
- gather ideas from people in a confluence page (TODO: add my own)
- complex UIs, GWT, DOJO, etc renderers for widgets
- Testing tools: seleniumxml -> testtools + demo (need to look into
licensing problems)
The "TODO" items are notes to myself for things to do. I'll be sending
out more messages soon about a few of these specific things.
For others who attended, please feel free to share your notes on this
thread.
For those who did not attend, please feel free to ask questions and
share your thoughts too.
-David
