Category: Alfresco

Alfresco open source content management

The plain truth about Alfresco’s open source ethos

There was a small flare-up on the Order of the Bee list this week. It started when someone suggested that the Community Edition (CE) versus Enterprise Edition comparison page on alfresco.com put CE in a negative light. In full disclosure, I collaborated with Marketing on that page when I worked for Alfresco. My goal at the time was to make sure that the comparison was fair and that it didn’t disparage Community Edition. I think it still passes that test and is similar to the comparison pages of other commercial open source companies.

My response to the original post to the list was that people shouldn’t bother trying to get the page changed. Why? Because how Alfresco Software, Inc. chooses to market their software is out-of-scope for the community. As long as the commercial company behind Alfresco doesn’t say anything untrue about Community Edition, the community shouldn’t care.

The fact that there is a commercial company behind Alfresco, that they are in the business of selling Enterprise support subscriptions, and at the same time have a vested interest in promoting the use of Community Edition to certain market segments is something you have to get your head around.

Actually there are a handful of things that you really need to understand and accept so you can be a happy member of the community. Here they are:

1. CE is distributed under LGPLv3 so it is open source.

If you need to put a label on it and you are a binary type of person, this is at the top of the list. Alfresco is “open source” because it is distributed under an OSI-approved license. A more fine-grained description is that it is “open core” because the same software is distributed under two different licenses, with the enterprise version being based on the free version and including features not available in the free version.

2. Committers will only ever be employees.

There have been various efforts over the years to get the community more involved in making direct code contributions. The most recent is that Aikau is on github and accepting pull requests. Maybe some day the core repository will be donated to Apache or some other foundation. Until then, if you want to commit directly to core, send a resume to Alfresco Software, Inc. I know they are hiring talented engineers.

3. Alfresco Software, Inc. is a commercial, for-profit business.

Already mentioned, but worth repeating: The company behind the software earns revenue from support subscriptions, and, increasingly, value-added features not available in the open source distribution. The company is going to do everything it can to maximize revenue. The community needs this to be the case because a portion of those resources support the community product. The company needs the community, so it won’t do anything to aggressively undermine adoption of the free product. You have to believe this to be true. A certain amount of trust is required for a symbiotic relationship to work.

4. “Open source” is not a guiding principle for the company.

Individuals within the company are ardent open source advocates and passionate and valued community members, but the organization as a whole does not use “open source” as a fundamental guiding principle. This should not be surprising when you consider that:

  1. “Drive Open Innovation” not “Open Source” is a core value to the company as publicly expressed on the Our Values page.
  2. The leadership team has no open source experience (except John Newton and PHH whose open source experience is Alfresco and Activiti).
  3. The community team doesn’t exist any more–the company has shifted to a “developer engagement” strategy rather than having a dedicated community leadership or advocacy team.

Accept the fact that this is a software company like any other, that distributes some of its software under an open source license and employs many talented people who spend a lot of their time (on- and off-hours) to further the efforts of the community. It is not a “everything-we-do-we-do-because-open-source” kind of company. It just isn’t.

5. Alfresco originally released under an open source license primarily as a go-to-market strategy

In the early days, open source was attractive to the company not because it wanted help building the software, but because the license undermined the position of proprietary vendors and because they hoped to gain market share quickly by leveraging the viral nature of freely-distributable software. Being open was an attractive (and highly marketable) contrast to the extremely closed and proprietary nature of legacy ECM vendors such as EMC and Microsoft.

I think John and Paul also hoped that the open and transparent nature of open source would lend itself to developer adoption, third-party integrations and add-ons, and a partner ecosystem, which it did.

I think it is this last one–the mismatch between the original motivations to release as open source and what we as a community expect from an open source project–that causes angst. The “open source” moniker attracts people who wish the project was more like an organic open source project than it can or ever will be.

For me, personally, I accepted these as givens a long time ago–none of them bother me any more. I am taking this gift that we’ve been given–a highly-functional, freely-distributable ECM platform–and I’m using it to help people. I’m no longer interested in holding the company to a dogmatic standard they never intended to be held to.

So be cool and do your thing

The “commercial” part of “commercial open source” creates a tension that is felt both internally and externally. Internal tension happens when decisions have to be made for the benefit of one side at the expense of the other. External tension happens when the community feels like the company isn’t always acting in their best interest and lacks the context or visibility needed to believe otherwise.

This tension is a natural by-product of the commercial open source model. It will always be there. Let’s acknowledge it, but I see no reason to antagonize it.

If you want to help the community around Alfresco, participate. Build something. Install the software and help others get it up and running. Join the Order of the Bee. If you want to help Alfresco with its marketing, send them your resume.

Alfresco tutorials updated to SDK 2.0 and Alfresco 5.0

I’ve recently updated the Alfresco Developer Series tutorials to work with version 2.0 of the Alfresco SDK and Alfresco 5.0.d (and Enterprise 5.0).

Note that the SDK is not backwards compatible. If you are running Alfresco 4.x you need to use the older version of the SDK. When you move to 5.0 you need to move to SDK 2.0. The steps to do that are roughly:

1. Merge your pom.xml with the one generated by the 2.0 archetype.
2. Copy/merge tomcat/context.xml.
3. Copy run.sh from a 2.0 project into yours. Only needed if you are using spring-loaded.
4. Copy/merge src/test/resources.
5. Copy/merge src/test/properties.

That part was easy for all of the tutorial projects. The time-consuming part was just updating the screenshots and a few of the steps. The code stayed the same across all projects.

If you are still on 4.x and you want to use the tutorials that are specific to the older version, just use the source tagged with “4.x” on github.

Quick Hack: Restricting Create Site Links to a Site Creators Group

At Alfresco Summit 2014 there was a wonderful session from Angel Borroy called, “10 Enhancements That Require Less Than 10 Lines of Code“. If you missed it you should follow that link and watch the recording.

Angel said the talk was inspired by my blog post about an example add-on I created that allows you to define default folder structures that get populated in the document library when you create a new site (see share-site-space-templates on GitHub).

One of the other 9 enhancements Angel showed was how to hide the “Create Site” link. I’ve seen so many of my clients and people in the forums asking for this functionality, I decided to enhance it a little bit, put it in an AMP, and make it available on GitHub. You can download share-site-creators and try it out for yourself.

Here’s a little more about how it works…

Instead of hiding the “Create Site” link from everyone but administrators, my add-on allows you to create a group that is used to determine who can create sites. The group, appropriately enough, is called “Site Creators”. If you aren’t in that group, you won’t see the “Create Site” link in any of these places:

  • The Sites menu
  • The “My Sites” Dashlet
  • The “Welcome” dashlet

Additionally, the add-on changes the underlying permissions at the repository tier so that if your teammates are hackers, they cannot circumvent the user interface and create their sites using other means.

The screenshot below (click to enlarge) shows what it looks like when you aren’t a member of the Site Creators group:

The Share Site Creators add-on restricts the Create Site link to a specific groupYou might notice that the text of the “Sharing” column in the welcome dashlet also changes to be more applicable to someone who cannot create their own sites.

The new text is in a properties file. Currently I have only an English version, so if any of my multi-lingual friends want to translate the new string, that might be useful to others.

Just like my Share Site Space Templates add-on, this one is not mind-blowing. But it is useful, both in terms of functionality, and as an example of how to override Alfresco Share web scripts without copying-and-pasting tons of code.

I’ve tested this with Alfresco 4.2.f Community Edition. If you want to get it working with other versions, or you have other improvements, bring on the pull requests!

Richard Esplin steps down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations

Things continue to be in flux at Alfresco with regards to how they manage their community. Today, Richard Esplin announced that he is stepping down as Head of Alfresco Community Relations to become a Product Manager for Alfresco Community Edition. In his blog post, Richard says that although his title changed a while back, his day-to-day job has still been mostly focused on the community, until now.

It sounds like rather than having a centralized team focused on managing the community, the various community touch points will be diffused throughout the organization.

Last month, Alfresco hired long-time community member, author, and former Ixxus employee, Martin Bergljung. I know through the grapevine there are more community hires on the way. These seem to be focused on “developer outreach” and “developer ecosystem” which is one aspect of community management.

I hope the “community is everyone’s job” approach does not lead to a “community is no one’s job” problem at Alfresco.

Related to Community Edition, Richard said, “I will be rethinking our approach to Alfresco Community Edition in order to make it a better product for its target audience”. My worry here is that there hasn’t always been agreement on what is the “target audience” for Alfresco Community Edition. In the past, Alfresco Software, Inc. has wanted the target audience to be developers who experiment and test out code that will ultimately become Enterprise Edition. The reality has been that many people want to run Community Edition in production–they want a high quality, free/libre open source software product that helps them solve document management problems.

Hopefully, Richard and the rest of the Alfresco team are aligned to the new reality of how Community Edition is being used.

It will definitely be interesting to see how these staffing shifts work out for the community.

Book Review: Learning Alfresco Web Scripts

Packt Publishing recently sent me a copy of Learning Alfresco Web Scripts by Ramesh Chauhan to review in exchange for my thoughts on the book which I’ll share with you now…

Web Scripts are an essential part of Alfresco. If you are extending or customizing the platform and you have time to learn only one thing about it, web scripts might very well be that thing. The reason is that they are key to so much else you might want to do such as integrating Alfresco with a third party system or customizing Alfresco Share, which is, at its core, comprised of web scripts.

Most technical books on Alfresco give some attention to web scripts, but this one dives into the details. After reading it, you’ll know how to do simple things with web scripts and you’ll have some idea of how to do more complex work beyond understanding the Model-View-Controller basics.

While the comprehensiveness is a good thing, I think it also presents a bit of a challenge which comes down to this: Who is this book for? If it is for beginners, it needs a lot more examples and could cut back on a lot of the technical detail. If it is for experts, point to existing sources for the basics and drill deeper on the interesting technical topics.

I did see a couple of bad practices in the book. First, in the chapter on Java-backed web scripts (Ch. 6) the author provides an example Spring configuration XML file that injects the lower-cased Alfresco beans into the web script class. This may sound like a trivial nitpick, but it’s actually a big no-no that I see repeatedly. If you have good reason for using the unsecured, internal-only, lower-cased beans, explain it. Otherwise, stick to the public, secured, upper-cased beans so that beginners don’t pick up a bad habit.

Similarly, there is a part that discusses where web script files can live in the Alfresco WAR. The author does point out that the extension directory is “preferred” but I don’t think this is worded strongly enough. Those other locations should have been left out entirely or maybe it could have said, “Place your files only in the extension directory. While these other locations may technically work, you should never use them.”

I was happy to see the chapter on the Maven SDK and the discussion of AMPs. And I think putting the Eclipse details later was a good idea, as one of the features of web scripts is that you don’t have to use Java or an IDE of any kind if you don’t want to. The book doesn’t cover Surf, Aikau, or Share customization in any detail, and I think that was also a good decision as those areas are too fluid at the moment and because the singular focus on web scripts is one of the book’s assets.

Overall, Learning Alfresco Web Scripts is a very thorough and comprehensive treatment of an important technical topic for Alfresco developers.

Alfresco Community Edition needs sensible version labels

See if you can answer this question: What is the current stable release of Alfresco Community Edition?

Some of you probably blurted out “5.0”. But that’s not specific enough. Alfresco Community Edition releases have letters as part of the release name. Did I hear someone say “5.0.c”? That is certainly the latest version but is that the current stable release? I would argue that it’s not and that the correct answer to the question is actually “4.2.f”. That’s the newest version I would recommend to anyone wanting to run Community Edition in production.

The problem is that you can’t actually tell what is supposed to be the stable release by looking at the version labels like you can with virtually every other open source software project. Hindsight is actually the only tool we have. The reason 4.2.f is the latest stable release is because it was the last release in the 4.2 Community Edition code line. We won’t know which 5.0 release is the stable one until Alfresco stops creating 5.0 releases!

Really, 5.0.a, 5.0.b, and 5.0.c should be labeled 5.0-RC1, 5.0-RC2, and 5.0-RC3. I’m using RC for “Release Candidate” here because that’s basically what they are, but “snapshot” or “milestone” could also work. We just need something that indicates that, eventually, we’re going to see an end to the iterations and finally arrive on a stable release and that you should really wait to deploy to production until that stable release comes out.

If you look at 4.2, I think 4.2.e was the “final” release and then 4.2.f was a special release to address a serious security vulnerability. So 4.2, a, b, c, and d should have been “release candidates”, 4.2.e should have just been 4.2.0, and 4.2.f should have been 4.2.1. I wouldn’t expect the third digit, which normally signifies a “service pack” to be anything other than 0 for the vast majority of Community Edition releases. The 4.2.f release was an exception to the norm which is that Alfresco doesn’t provide service packs for CE.

The reason an easily identifiable release label is important is because today people in the community are going to the Alfresco download page and assuming that what they are downloading is a stable release. They are then installing and running that release in production. This leaves those people disappointed down the road when they find out they installed software with numerous known issues or partly-implemented features (I know those issues are often documented in the release notes and in Jira). The point is that downloaders, particularly newcomers, don’t have (and shouldn’t need) the insight that Alfresco releases don’t really settle down until the fourth iteration or so. That should be explicit.

The reason Alfresco doesn’t use “stable” to describe the release is partly commercial. The thinking is that doing so makes running the freely-available Community Edition in production seem less risky or even encouraged by the company that depends on revenue from the paid edition.

The other challenge is about process. I don’t think engineering always knows that a given Community Edition release is going to be the last one until after the fact.

Both of these could be addressed with a mindset change. Instead of “Let’s iterate on release X.0 until we’re ready to work on the next major release” the thinking ought to be, “Let’s drive toward a stable, production-ready X.0 release and once we think we have it, let’s call it that”.

I’ve heard chatter that Alfresco might, at some point, consider offering support for those running CE. Based on the number of SMB’s who have told me that Alfresco One is out-of-reach for them financially, there ought to be a strong demand for a low-priced subscription around Community Edition. If that happens, I assume both the mentality and the process around CE version labels will get cleaned up. But I hope we don’t have to wait.

You may be surprised at what’s not in Alfresco 5

4325797829_280db25ffe_zIt won’t be long before we’ll be celebrating Alfresco’s tenth birthday. Sniff, sniff, they grow up so fast!

As part of that growth, it’s only natural that certain areas of the product will reach their end-of-life. Since its first release we’ve seen very little pruning of old or obsolete features, but that changes with the Alfresco Community Edition 5.0.b release.

Some of the things that have been dropped won’t surprise anyone. Some I consider regressions and may actually come back quickly, at least I hope they do. The surprises have been handled a little sloppily–Richard Esplin, the current head of community apologized for that earlier this week, essentially saying it was due to the rush to get 5.0.b out in time for Alfresco Summit.

You can read Richard’s post and the release notes for the full list of feature removals. In this post I’ll call out the major items you will no longer find in Alfresco Community Edition as of 5.0.b.

Alfresco Explorer

If you’ve paid any attention to my blog or just about anyone else who speaks or writes about Alfresco you already knew to avoid the original JSF-based web client called “Alfresco Explorer”. It’s the original web client accessible at /alfresco.

Alfresco has been saying Explorer was going away for a long time and they’ve finally done it. If you fire up Alfresco 5.0.b Community Edition and go to /alfresco you’ll find our old friend is no more. Good night, sweet prince!

All of my clients have been focused on Alfresco Share for years so if the impact of the change was simply that you couldn’t log in to that old client any longer it wouldn’t be a big deal, but there has been some collateral damage, which brings us to the next section…

Workflow Console, Tenant Console, or Basically Any Console

Unfortunately, some vital consoles leveraged the same JSF code base as Alfresco Explorer. When that went, these consoles went as well. The old saying about babies and bathwater comes to mind.

The removal of the workflow console is particularly irksome. It’s critical to anyone doing anything with either Activiti or jBPM in Community Edition. In my opinion, this is the most important console of the bunch.

The data dictionary console is also gone, which is used to enable or disable hot-deployed content models. If you only use content models deployed as part of the WAR this won’t affect you.

The tenant console is also gone. This obviously won’t affect you unless you are using the multi-tenancy feature.

The AVM console is also gone, but then again, so is the AVM as I’ll touch on briefly next.

The frustrating thing about these missing consoles is that they aren’t planned to make a return until 5.1, according to Richard. That makes 5.0 Community Edition harder to use than it needs to be. It’s possible that Alfresco will make the console framework available so that the community can help get these back in place quickly.

The AVM

The AVM is the ill-fated Web Content Management offering that Alfresco told you was reaching its End-of-Life back in February of 2012 so, again, you should not be surprised about this one. All but a handful of people have found other WCM solutions.

Lucene

This one sparked a WTF moment on Twitter earlier in the month when I was shocked to realize that 5.0.b Community Edition required Solr to be fully functional. Without it, you can’t do a people search, for example. Actually, you can’t do a full-text search either. So in my book, this makes Solr required to run.

Prior to this change you could choose either Solr or Lucene. I often used Lucene locally because it was one less WAR to deal with and it was the default when doing a manual WAR install. Some people preferred Lucene’s in-transaction indexing over Solr’s asynchronous indexing and eventual consistency.

I understand that Solr is the way forward for Alfresco. It just felt like this one was a bit rushed. I don’t remember any public communication saying that Lucene would no longer be an option in 5.0. The Alfresco Product Support Status page doesn’t list it either. Richard’s post says, “When we added Solr to Alfresco 4, we deprecated Lucene.” That may be true, I’m just not sure Alfresco told anyone, although it is possible I missed it.

SDK, API, & Publishing Features

The release notes for 5.0.b includes a “Feature Removals” section. Noteworthy entries include:

  • The old Java SDK has now been replaced with the Maven-based SDK in Github. This has been a long time coming.
  • The CMIS API endpoints from 3.x and 4.0 have been removed (use the 4.2 URLs). People are constantly using the wrong CMIS service URL for their version. Maybe this will help that.
  • “CML” Web Services SOAP API. Another one that is past-due.
  • JCR / JCR-RMI. I rarely see this used.
  • URL Addressability API. Who needs it when you’ve got web scripts?
  • Social Publishing Features.
  • Blog Publishing Features

These are all positive changes and I suspect will help Alfresco a lot on the engineering and support side.

Future Removals

The release notes also include a note that NFS and jBPM are now officially deprecated. I’ve been expecting the jBPM removal for a while now. If you haven’t started moving everything to Activiti process definitions you should definitely do so now.

Getting the old stuff out of the distribution is great–I’m glad to see it. I hope that going forward Alfresco can do a better job communicating openly in a timely manner about major changes like dropping Lucene. It sounds like Richard is going to take that on as part of his new role in Product Management, which is a very good thing.

 

10 ways Alfresco customers can support the community

A prospective Alfresco customer recently asked me some of the ways an Alfresco customer can support the Alfresco community. Here’s what I said:

  1. Give your employees company time to answer questions in the forum or participate in the community in other ways. Perhaps set up an objective related to something on this list.
  2. Write a blog post about your experience with Alfresco (doesn’t have to be technical) then tweet the link with #Alfresco.
  3. Share your story at a meetup, Alfresco Summit, or some other conference.
  4. Make your office space available for local Alfresco meetups. If there isn’t a regular meetup in your area, start one and keep it going quarterly.
  5. If you customize Alfresco, take the customizations that don’t represent a competitive advantage to your business and contribute them to the community as freely-available addons. If you don’t want to take the time to package it up as a formal add-on, at least stick your code on github or a similar public code repository.
  6. Similar to the above, if you hire systems integrators, word your contracts such that they can contribute the code they write for you to the community. (Often the default language assigns IP ownership to the hiring party).
  7. If you choose Community Edition, give your time to the Order of the Bee so that you can help others be successful running Community Edition in production. The Order is particularly interested in Community Edition success stories at the moment.
  8. File helpful bug reports and make sure they are free of information specific to your business so that Alfresco will keep them public.
  9. If you not only find a bug but fix it, contribute the patch. One way to do that is to create a pull request on GitHub in the Alfresco Community Edition project then reference that pull request in an Alfresco Jira.
  10. If you see something wrong or missing on the wiki, log in and fix it.

Really, this list is mostly applicable to anyone that wants to participate in the community, not just customers. What did I leave out? Add more ideas in the comments.

What we’re dying to hear at Alfresco Summit

For the first time, ever, I will not be in attendance at this year’s annual Alfresco conference. I’m going to miss catching up with old friends, meeting new ones, learning, and sharing stories.

I’m also going to miss hearing what Alfresco has planned. Now, more than ever, Alfresco needs to inspire. As I won’t be there I need the rest of you to go to Alfresco Summit and take good notes for me. Here’s what you should be listening for…

What Are You Doing With the Money, Doug?

At last year’s conference Alfresco CEO, Doug Dennerline, made a quip about how much fun he was having spending all of the money Alfresco had amassed prior to his arrival. Now he’s secured another round of funding.

I think partners, customers, and the community want to hear what the specific plans are for all of that cash. In a Q&A with the community, Doug said he felt like there were too few sales people for a company the size of Alfresco’s. In the old days, Alfresco had an “inbound” model, where people would try the free stuff and call a sales person when they were ready for support. Doug is inverting that and going with a traditional “outbound” model. That obviously takes cash, and it may be critical for the company to grow to where Doug and the investors would like, but it is rather uninspiring to the rest of us. Where are the bold, audacious plans? Where is the disruption? Which brings me to my next theme to listen for…

Keep Alfresco Weird

Remember when Alfresco was different? It was open source. It was lightweight. It appealed to developers and consultants because it could approximate what a Documentum aircraft carrier could do but it had the agility of a speedboat. And, perhaps above all, it was cheap.

Now it feels like that free-wheeling soul, that maverick of ECM, that long-haired hippy love-child, born of a one-night stand between ECM and Linux, is looking in the mirror and realizing it has slowly become its father.

Maybe in some ways, growing up was necessary. Alfresco certainly feels more stable than years past. But what I want to hear is that the scrappiness is still there. I want to see some features that competitors haven’t thought of yet. I want to look into the eyes of the grown-up Alfresco and see (and believe) that the mischievous flicker of youth is still glowing, ready to shake things up.

Successfully Shoot the Gap Or Get Crushed?

Alfresco is in a unique position. There are the cloud-only players on one side who are beating Alfresco on some dimensions (ease-of-use, flawless file sync, ubiquity) and are, at least for now, losing to Alfresco on other dimensions (on-premises capability, security, business relevance). On the other side, you’ve got legacy players. Alfresco is still more nimble than they are, but with recent price increases, Alfresco can no longer beat them on price alone. That gap is either Alfresco’s opportunity or its demise.

Every day those cloud-only players add business-relevant functionality that their (huge) user base demands. They’ve got endless cash. And dear Lord, the marketing. If I have to read one more bullshit TechCrunch article about how Aaron Levie “invented” the alternative to ECM, I’m going to lose it. Bottom-line is that the cloud-only guys have their sites set on Alfresco’s bread-and-butter.

And those legacy vendors, the ones Alfresco initially disrupted with an open source model, are not only showing signs of life, but in some cases are actually introducing innovative functionality. If Alfresco turns away from the low-cost leader strategy they miss out on a huge lever needed to unseat incumbent vendors. “Openness” may not be enough to win in a toe-to-toe battle of function points.

So what exactly is the strategy for successfully shooting the gap? We’ve all heard the plans Alfresco has around providing content-centric business apps as SaaS offerings. That sounds great for the niche markets interested in those offerings. But that sounds more like one leg of the strategy, not the whole thing. I don’t think you’re fighting off Google, Microsoft, and Amazon with a few new SaaS offerings a year.

So Take Good Notes For Me

Alfresco has had two years to establish the office in the valley, to get their shit together, and to start kicking ass again. What I’m hoping is that at this year’s Alfresco Summit, they will give us credible details about how that $45 million is going to be spent in such a way as to make all of the customers, partners, employees, and community members glad they bet their businesses and careers on what was once an innovative, game-changing, start-up called Alfresco.

Take good notes and report back!

Independent Alfresco community forms to guarantee freely-available open source ECM forever

Something very interesting is afoot in the Alfresco community. A subset of the community has formed an independent organization called The Order of the Bee, aimed at making sure the freely-available open source platform for Enterprise Content Management stays freely-available, forever.

The group of individuals, who hail from all parts of the globe, are customers, partners, independent individuals, and even Alfresco Software employees. Despite varied backgrounds and interests, they all have at least one thing in common: They want to make sure that Alfresco Community Edition stays free and open.

Alfresco has always provided what is essentially an “open core” distribution. The on-premises software ships in two editions: Community Edition is the freely-available software licensed under the LGPLv3 and Enterprise Edition is commercially licensed. But lately there has been growing concern amongst community members that Alfresco Software, the commercial company behind the product, doesn’t always have the best interests of the community in mind. Thus was born The Order of the Bee, a reference to the community keynote I delivered at Alfresco Summit 2013.

The Order began forming about the same time I stepped down as Alfresco’s Chief Community Officer. While the timing is uncanny, and I am a founding member of the Order, that timing was not planned and is coincidental.

Check out the web site to see what the Order is all about. If you feel compelled to participate, be sure to submit the contact form. And follow the group on Twitter.