Month: September 2011

Worldwide Alfresco 4.0 Community Release Party

You have probably heard that Alfresco 4.0 (formerly known by its codename, “Swift”) will be officially released in the Community edition at the end of September. I’ve been playing with the latest Community code sitting in subversion and I have to tell you that, although there are still plenty of issues to resolve, I’m getting pretty excited about the release.

I know I’m not the only one that’s been looking at 4.0 with building anticipation toward an official release. So here’s what I think we should do. Let’s celebrate. This year, the week of October 10 shall be known as the Week of Worldwide Alfresco 4.0 Community Release Party Meetups! Wherever you are in the world, pick a day that week and get together with 1, 10, or 100 other people and share why you’re excited about 4.0. It doesn’t have to be formal and you don’t have to go to a lot of trouble. Grab Community 4.0 from the download page when it becomes available (or use one of the nightly builds or build it yourself), install it, and give a demo. Or just get a conversation going about favorite new features, when/how you plan to upgrade, or how you are using Alfresco today. Exactly what you talk about doesn’t really matter–the point is to celebrate this major release.

I’ve already spoken to several of the local community organizers around the world and they are totally into it. Madrid, Paris, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Jakarta, The Netherlands, and Southern California are all likely to have events going on the week of October 10 to celebrate. I believe Germany will be doing some virtual meetups online. To help you find these and others that will hopefully be inspired to spring up, refer to this wiki page that lists new or still-forming meetup groups. If you don’t see one there, go to Alfresco Meetups Everywhere and sign up. When another person in your area signs up you can organize a time and a place to meet.

I really want to see this happen. And I know the way to an Alfresco Geek’s heart is through his or her stomach. So if you promote your plan to have a meetup the week of October 10 via Twitter, and then you post pictures of the event on Flickr tagged with “Alfresco”, you can submit your food receipt to me and I’ll reimburse you up to $100. If you plan to take advantage of this you must register your interest with me two weeks prior to your meetup date so I can get you the details. Just shoot an email to jpotts at alfresco dot com with your plans.

I’ll also try to get a “What’s New in Alfresco 4.0” presentation posted, maybe with some screencasts as well, to help with the content.

There you go: A major release of the software to the community, free food, and starter content. The only key ingredients remaining are you, your laptop, and a friend or two. What do you say? Are you in?

Alfresco DevCon 2011 session list has been posted

I’ve finally finalized the list of sessions for Alfresco DevCon Americas in San Diego and Alfresco DevCon EMEA in London. Have a gander. I’m sure I’ll be running around like a wild man those two days, but if I get to see some sessions, I think I’m going to be hard-pressed to choose which ones to go to.

My next step is to put those sessions in date-time and room slots. To fix the schedule, basically. It’s an interesting Sudoku-like exercise. You don’t want to have overlapping tracks for a given time slot, you can’t have overlapping speakers for a given time slot, there’s a bit of a logical progression between some sessions, and you want to try to avoid scheduling extremely hot sessions for the same time slot.

The last one is the really tough one. I can pick my favorites but those won’t necessarily reflect the group’s favorites. If all of my rooms were the same size it wouldn’t matter, but they aren’t. In each city we’ve got one big breakout room and two smaller ones.

To get some handle on how well attended some of these might be I’ve created a very short survey. The survey is basically, “Which city are you attending” and “Pick your favorite sessions from this long list”. If you are planning on attending and you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate it if you’d review the list of sessions for your DevCon city, then take the survey.

Even with this survey the schedule won’t be perfect. Apologies ahead of time if you have to make a tough choice.