Category: Alfresco DevCon

Alfresco Community Pledges & other things that worked well at DevCon

I had so much fun putting on Alfresco DevCon last week in San Diego. You can read my short wrap-up on the Alfresco DevCon Blog. Claudia Saleh also provides Day 1 Re-Cap and Day 2 Re-Cap posts as well. And Claudia took a lot of great pics at the event and put them on Flickr. After London we’ll get all of the presentations from both events on SlideShare for everyone to enjoy.

We tried a lot of new things at DevCon last week. I thought I’d re-cap what worked well here:

Purposeful lunches. DevCon was two days. On Day 1, we assigned a technical topic to each lunch table and then made sure an Engineer was at each table to cover that topic. Attendees sorted themselves to the table they were interested in discussing over lunch. Some tables really worked their topic over thoroughly during lunch. Others used it as an icebreaker and then moved on to other stuff. On Day 2 we divided the tables up by geography and industry vertical. Most people I talked to liked the concept.

Engineering Office Hours. The concept is a repeat from our first DevCon, but this year we had a bulletin board with each Engineer, their bio, their picture, and a sign-up sheet. Attendees grabbed a slot, then met with their Engineer. This worked out really well. For London we’ll pre-print the time slots rather than have them be freeform.

Panel Discussion. Last year at DevCon in New York, the panel discussion was a little ad hoc. This year we put the panel discussion on the morning of the second day as a general session and that seemed to work. For London, we’re moving the panel discussion to the end of the second day so any questions that the day 2 sessions raise can be asked at that time. It should also give us a nice opportunity to recap the conference.

Alfresco Community Pledges. DevCon serves a lot of purposes. One is to energize and motivate people to get involved with the Alfresco community. I had some extra Alfresco “attitude” t-shirts so I decided to give them to people who would pledge to make some contribution to the community in the coming weeks and months. Here are some that we got via twitter.

@dev_kraig Kraig Van Houten
@Alfresco I #pledge to write one #alfresco related blog post per month

@SunilRehman Sunil Rehman
@Alfresco I #pledge to report 5 new #Alfresco 4.0 b bugs before thanksgiving

@WillWhite18 Will White
I #pledge to report at least 5 bugs in #Alfresco 4.0b before thanksgiving.

@Michaelcford Michael C Ford
@Alfresco I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum post in the next 3 weeks

@emmichie Eric Michie
I #pledge to host an #Alfresco meetup in my area twice this quarter. Salt Lake City Utah

@tenthline_ecm Tenthline
@tenthline_ecm will #pledge to host #Alfresco meetup in #Toronto twice this quarter.

@aaronaheath Aaron Heath
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month for the next 12 months. I will also become more active on the #Alfresco forum.

@perejnar Per Ejnar Thomsen
I #pledge to report 5 new (legitimate) #Alfresco 4.0b bugs before Thanksgiving

@dstaflund Darryl Stafflund
I #pledge to answer 6 unanswered #Alfresco forum posts in the next three Weeks.

@iancrew Ian Crew
I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

@trisofer Chris Paul
@jeffpotts01 I #pledge to write one #Alfresco related blog post per month.

It was great to see these and to talk to people between sessions who said the conference was the kick in the pants they needed to get going again with their contributions.

Thanks to everyone who attended, sponsored, or spoke at DevCon San Diego. It exceeded my expectations and hopefully yours as well. I’ll report back here after London and we’ll see if these ideas were just as successful for that event.

List of Alfresco Dashlet Challenge 2011 Entries

The Alfresco Dashlet Challenge contest has been over for quite a while and our winner, Florian Maul, has received his iPad and has already racked up some impressive Fruit Ninja scores, but I’m just now getting around to posting the entire list of entries. I’ve put the list on the Alfresco wiki.

Please do take a look at these projects and try them in your own installations. In many cases, it’s a single JAR you drop in, then restart and you’re done. If you find problems, don’t hesitate to log issues or maybe even crack open your editor, fix it, and contribute it back to the author.

I should take this opportunity to mention a little project we’ve got brewing. If you’ve heard any of my “State of the Community” talks you may already know about Alfresco Add-Ons. It’s a site we’re building that will do a better job of helping you find and rate add-ons the community is creating for the Alfresco platform. An Add-On might be a dashlet, like the Dashlet Challenge entries, or it might be an integration, or an API, or just about anything else that works with Alfresco.

Add-Ons isn’t meant to be a project hosting site. There are already a lot of those available. Instead, think of it as a directory or index with some social features to help the cream rise to the top. This will give everyone (Community & Enterprise users) a one-stop shop for add-ons and extensions.

We’re hoping to have a minimum viable product ready by DevCon. If it gets done and enough people want to see it, we’ll have an ad hoc session so we can look at it together. We’d obviously like to get feedback from the community for the next sprint.

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.

Alfresco DevCon 2011 Call for Papers

I’ve just posted the official call for papers for Alfresco DevCon 2011. I know a lot of ecmarchitect.com readers have done some really cool things with Alfresco. This is a great opportunity for you to share those stories with the rest of us.

Also, let me know if there is anything significant missing from the proposed list of tracks, which is:

  • Alfresco as a Platform
  • Best Practices
  • Customizing Alfresco
  • Case Studies
  • BPM
  • Building WCM Solutions with Alfresco

Just like last year, we’ll have three sessions running concurrently throughout the day. We’ll start Day 1 with opening remarks from me, then move right into a keynote from John Newton, which is always a crowd favorite. Then I was thinking it would be good to have a “What’s New in 4.0?” general session, then split into breakouts after that. The only other general session I could see us doing would be an Engineering Panel Discussion, maybe on the morning of Day 2.

Any and all feedback is welcome!

Alfresco DevCon coming to San Diego and London this Fall

We’ve finally got everything settled around the cities, venues, and dates for our annual Alfresco DevCon. This year we will be in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel in the Gaslamp Quarter October 26th & 27th and in London at Prospero House in Central London November 9th & 10th.

In both cities, the two conference days will be preceded by a Training Day. So, if you want to take the Jump Start or Advanced training courses and attend the full conference, you’ll need to block out three days. If you are skipping Training Day, you’ll need to block out two days.

My official announcement is on the DevCon blog, here. You should get in the habit of following that blog for all DevCon related news. I’ll try to point you to additional posts on that blog as they happen, but that feels kind of redundant.

We’ll get registration turned on soon. And we’ll be sharing additional info around hotel and travel, so watch that blog.

Alfresco DevCon 2010 presentations now available

I’ve uploaded most of the presentations from Alfresco DevCon 2010 to SlideShare. The easiest way to get to them is to use the DevCon 2010 tag.

You may be thinking, “Damn, the conference was seven months ago, why do I care?” and to that I have two responses. First, sorry. We’ll do better this year. Second, the collection includes some really helpful resources on a variety of topics. I think every one of them could help someone out there on projects today.

Here are some of my favorites:

Okay, that’s half of the sessions, but it is hard to narrow them down. Anyway, take a look and favorite the ones you really like. Also, if you are planning on attending DevCon this year, feel free to give me feedback like, “More sessions like this would be great,” or “Maybe not so much of this one this year”. That will help me plan the conference tracks and content.