The OpenNTF boat race
by Volker Weber
You probably heard the corporate boat race joke before (1 person rowing and 8 people steering), if not then Google is your friend. A week ago, I was at DNUG, and once again met Niklas Heidloff. He is the one person rowing. And it's working much better, since the other eight persons got a bit tired of steering. I said that, not Niklas.
Anyway, if you like OpenNTF, Niklas is the person who deserves the credit.
Comments
Hello Volker
thank you very much for adressing this.
Yes Niklas does a very very good job with OpenNTF and XPages.info and Mobile App
A N D he did a very good Presentation at DNUG Application development
Thx to you for talking this good thing and thx to Niclas for all the service he proviedes for us.
Kind Regards
Werner
It is very nice of you to give credit where credit is due.
OpenNTF is indeed a much better resource than it once was
; )
Thanks for your nice words, Volker.
But there are certainly more people than me. OpenNTF has always been and is a community effort. Some examples:
The value of OpenNTF is the open source code and that is provided by many different contributors. Just in the last 3 weeks we got 10 new reusable XPages controls submitted by Ferry Kranenburg, Ulrich Krause, Mark Hughes, Paul Withers, Frank van der Linden and Patrick Kwinten. In this context I also need to call out some more of our main contributors like Declan Lynch, Rene Winkelmeyer, Karsten Lehmann, Chris Connor, Andrew Luder and others. Also companies like ISW contributed popular projects like Wildfire.
Bruce Elgort, as the Steering Committee chair, plays a key role in OpenNTF. We work together almost on a daily basis. He does the featured project of the month, graphics for the site, promotions via sessions and podcasts and many other things. We also work together on several things behind the scenes like the planning of the contest and the planning for advertisement. Furthermore Bruce coordinates the SC meetings and most recently the planning for a non profit organization.
The OpenNTF member Prominic (Justin Hill and team) provides free hosting of our production and development servers and they do the core administration. Vince Schurman handles the financial aspects. And other members like Nathan Freeman, John Head, Corey Davis, Scott Johnson, Ludwig Nastansky provide valuable input and help. There are also other companies supporting OpenNTF. We4IT for example sponsors the first XPages development contest. Other companies support OpenNTF by paying for ads.
There are also many people who have helped with the OpenNTF infrastructure. Ferry Kranenburg, Stan Uptagrafft, Thomas Ladehoff, Thomas Bahn, Frank van der Linden, Bruce Lill, Daniele Vistalli and others. Just yesterday Stephan Wissel implemented an improvement to easier download releases. A special role had obviously Steve Castledine who worked with me closely at the beginning of the new OpenNTF Alliance.
There are also many IBM contributors like Phil Riand, David Taieb, etc. for which I'm often only the committer. In fact without the support of Brent Peters this whole effort wouldn't have been possible who has asked his organization to help out and utilize OpenNTF. Also without Peter Tanner, our IP manager, we wouldn't have the mature open source site we have now.
I'm sure I forgot to mention many people. For example all the developers who provide input, report defects etc. for the particular projects. There are also people like David Leedy, Tim Clark, Paul Withers, Joyce Davis who help us promoting OpenNTF via podcasts, community meetings, etc. When we did XPages.info David Leedy had reserved that domain but when he heard about our plan he gave us that domain immediately. Also other efforts like the Learn XPages Month have been really organized by other people (Howard Greenbery, Matt White) who utilize OpenNTF as platform.
Long response, but I wanted to make clear that many people have made OpenNTF successful and I'm proud to be part of it.
Niklas, I am sure there are more than eight.
There are more than eight and as I said I was sure I forgot to mention people/members. Many of the people that I mention above though work for members that I didn't call out explicitly. I forgot to mention the code contributions from Julian Buss, Julian Robichaux, Nathan Freeman and team, John Head, Pavone and others, the help with administration from Gab Davis, free licenses for tools from other members, etc. And I'm sure I forgot more contributions again but there is too much to know all of this from the top of my head.
