2014 Liferay Community Pulse Awards

Wow. Just.. WOW. It's Liferay's 10th anniversary, and I've been blessed to be able to be a part of it the last several years, including this year. A big round of applause goes to you and our entire community for your work and achievements this year! It's been an interesting year for us, both in terms of technology and community. If you attended any online or in-person events this year and heard our community leaders talk, you have a head start on witnessing some of the cool stuff we are doing as we transition Liferay to an even more ultra-cool and modern web platform.

And the best part? Not only is it happening in open source, it's becoming even more accessible to you via our community and is right there in front of you waiting for you to dig in and help complete the journey with us! It's really easy to sit back, watch, and consume, but it's much more rewarding personally and professionally when you get involved. One of those rewards is one I strongly believe in, which is recognition amongst peers that you are helping to make a difference. So, to that end I was honored to be able to present this year's 2014 Community Pulse Awards to those organizations and individuals that are helping shape Liferay for the future!

Liferay Pulse Award: Community Contributors of the Year

This award is given to individuals (not employed by Liferay or its partners) that volunteer their time and effort to make Liferay and its community better. This year, extra marks were given for well-rounded participation and contribution in different areas, as well as for value given through non-liferay.com venues (e.g. personal blogs, stackoverflow.com, and others).

In no particular order, I present to you our Liferay Community Contributors of the Year for 2014!

Bijan Vakili (USA)

Bijan is the de facto IRC channel maintainer and longtime community member - setting up a very useful log, and also developed a very cool set of open source Marketplace apps which connect Liferay admins directly to IRC to get questions answered from right inside Liferay!

Dave Nebinger (USA)

If you hang out on our forums at all, you probably know Dave - one of the most prolific contributors to our forums, with an impressive 1700+ posts this year alone and 56 solutions (as voted by those who asked!). He's also a 2-time winner of the quarterly Top Contributor award and is in the chase to become top poster of all time.

Nagul Meera (India)

Nagul is also a heavy contributor to our forums and wiki, with over 600 posts and comes in 3rd place in the answer-to-post ratio, and maintains a great blog on technical tips and tricks for Liferay.

Denis Signoretto (Italy)

Denis had a well-rounded contribution track this year, with contributions across many areas including the forums and wiki, as well as contributing an good amount of bug reports, 25% for which he contribution code solutions!

Krzysztof Gołębiowski (Poland)

Krzysztof is our #2 answer-to-post ratio (308/14) and also contributes around the community, including bug reporting and code contributions, and is active in the Poland user group, and unknowingly contributes in other ways (making sure Liferay supports his name!).

If you see these folks in our community, be sure to congratulate them on a job very well done this year!

Liferay Pulse Award: Community Excellence

Liferay's growth and success over the last several years has be in no small part due to our awesome worldwide network of partners. The Community Excellence Award is given to those in our partner community who demonstrate a unique and valuable dedication to our open source community. Companies here have spent their own time and resources to make our community better, which of course benefits everyone, so we recognize them here and thank them for their dedication to growing Liferay and its community.

EMEA

ACA-IT (Belgium)

ACA has been a big supporter of our community this year, sponsoring (and contributing to!) events and has begun to document their Liferay chops in an excellent series of blogs on Liferay and other technologies in which they have expertise. ACA has also contributed 2 very useful apps to the Marketplace, heads up the Belgium User Group, and we value their continued presence in our community!

Arcusys (Finland)

Arcusys is probably best known for their 2 award-winning open source apps on the Marketplace, but also are active on our community forums, blogs, and the Finland user group. Arcusys is a big champion of Liferay throughout Finland's healthy open source ecosystem, recently achieved Platinum status, and their spirit aligns nicely with our open source community.

Componence (Netherlands)

Once again we find Componence on our list, due to their continued support of our Dutch Liferay community - including actively managing the Netherlands user group, sponsoring events (as well as organizing events within events), active contributors to our forums and Liferay Dutch translations and several utility apps on the Marketplace.

SMC (Italy)

SMC founded and continues to lead the Italy User Group, and was one of the first Liferay partners ever, so it is no surprise they are committed to our community. SMC also contributed to our Italian and English forums, and is the organizing sponsor of this year's Italy Symposium which begins today in Rome! They also developed a liferay.com forums app for iOS/Android for you to participate in our forums, several outstanding Marketplace apps, and contribute to the Liferay Calendar feature and Mobile SDK.

Americas / APAC

Cignex Datamatics (USA)

Cignex is a long time contributor and repeat winner of Community Excellence. They have "doubled down" on their community contribution and it shows - several individuals have been recognized as quarterly top contributors and they are heavy participants on our forums, blogs, and sponsor Liferay events worldwide.

Permeance Technologies (Australia)

Permeance continues to be a big open source contributor, authoring a set of 8 really useful apps on the Marketplace (I use the Log Viewer on a daily basis in our cloud infrastructure), and graciously contributing their source code to our community and showing us how to do apps right. They also routinely break Liferay as part of their training and support roles, file bugs, and work with Liferay to fix it so you don't have to!

Rivet Logic (USA)

This is Rivet Logic's first win for Community Excellence - the entire team has stepped up their game this year through road shows, event sponsorship, and they have also authored the most number of apps by a single company across the entire Marketplace - 18 of them - all free and open source. Their track record in our community helps all of you - and helps them as well, which is what community is all about. Hear their story.

Savoir-faire Linux (Canada)

I had some details on Savoir-faire but instead want you to watch this video - it says everything I'd put here. They are awesome contributors and really understand open source and community.

XTIVIA (USA)

XTIVIA is ever present in our community, and has shown their passion for it through their contributions to our forums and community meetups (both offline and in person), spreading not only their passion but their knowledge of Liferay through these efforts. They lead the Austin, SoCal, and Denver user groups, sponsor events, and have contributed a handful of unique and useful Marketplace apps. Their recognition as Liferay's North America Partner of the Year I hope was in part due to their community excellence, and we look forward to 2015 with the team!

Please join me in congratulating all of these individual contributors and partners. They, along with the rest of our community, are what make my job so rewarding and what I believe makes Liferay stand out above all as an example of open source and community at its best. Great job everyone! I am very happy to see all the enthusiasm and passion for open source and for Liferay, and I look forward to seeing what we can accomplish in 2015 and beyond.

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Note: Pulse Awards were also given to "Best" Liferay implementations as well.

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