First off, many thanks to the Liferay team for giving me a chance to be a part of it all.  I think these are exciting times for open source and will continue to be for quite some time.  I came from Sun/Oracle where I worked on portal stuff since 2008 (we adopted Liferay as a core technology on which to base Sun's next portal, which is how I got involved with Liferay in the first place.)  In that time I've experienced the pleasure and occasional pain (BChan rollbacks, anyone?) of working with a talented and diverse set of community members from Liferay and other open source products.  It's cool to watch the passion, ingenuity, and collaboration of people turn a bunch of bits into a very useful and rewarding product.

As Liferay's new Community Manager, I will continue the work started by others. This means more than responding to message board posts (which, btw, we are averaging ~ 100/day which is awesome and scary), and the occasional blog or tweet.  As a community member, I want you to know how the platform is evolving, why, and when changes will occur that you may not be aware of.  I want you to look forward to participating in the community, and be rewarded for doing so.  I want you to understand Liferay's role in the larger enterprise open source community, and be willing to champion it in your day to day activities.  As a contributor, I want you to have the tools you need to make your mark.  I also want you to be proud of your participation and contributions, be able to showcase them, and be rewarded as well.  By the way, contributing does not always mean coding.  There are many ways to contribute, including participating in roadmap discussions, reporting bugs, suggesting improvements, answering questions, writing documentation, giving talks, working on standards, starting new user groups, connecting with others to share ideas, and other vital tasks necessary in a healthy community.  If you want to volunteer for talks (esp. on Liferay LIVE) please let me know.  If you are participating in a Liferay User Group or any forum, I'd love to know about it.

It all sounds awesome, doesn't it?  I know what you're thinking: that this motherhood-and-apple-pie introductory blog post is the easy part.

Some of the things I am working on in the short term:

• "What do you want from me?" (I am a big Pink Floyd fan)
• Find out from you what is working and more importantly what is not working.  Feel free to let me know via comments on this post.
• Identify and build up community leaders.  Self-sustaining and all..
• Engage with you on the roadmap for 6.1 and beyond
• Better release documentation (when they will occur, release notes, etc)
• Re-organize community documentation pages and links to be clearer and up-to-date

I'm a big believer in the power of the Liferay community and open source in general, and am looking forward to making a difference.