My obligatory introductory post...

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.
James Falkner
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.

19
Blogs
Hello James,

Does it mean youo will update http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Product+Roadmap soon? emoticon

Cheers,
Szymon
Yep, but it's more than just updating a wiki, I'm looking for ways to engage the community even more using some of the newer tools we have. As far as roadmap wiki, yes, that'll be updated for 6.1 and beyond as we (community) develop it along with engineering.
Welcome. I think many in the liferay "community" have been feeling frustrated. I know i do. Here's hoping things will change for the better
What a high jump photo!!! kidding, bet its like flying experience working with liferay
Sandeep, yeah, it's definitely fun working here. Coming from Sun (40k employees) and Oracle (110k employees!) it's refreshing to see people working together this way emoticon
Happy to hear this news!

I think it's a good idea improve and follow community suggestion and requirements. I guess you already know
all contributions in Proposal Community Wiki.
(http://www.liferay.com/community/wiki/-/wiki/Proposals/FrontPage)
I think Liferay has made a great choice assign a community manager.

Thanks,
D.
Hey Denis, yeah I've seen it (and know it is used to mine for improvements for 6.0 and beyond). Juan has also been moving them into JIRA to get into our development workflow, classifying and categorizing as needed. I'll post a separate topic about that soon.
A community manager is a welcome improvement does it mean you folow the 9. Liferay's Community category closely ?
http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/category/243741
Yes, I am reading that forum, among other things. I've been reading historical threads to get a feeling about the kinds of issues the community faces so I know how best to do my job. Our biggest challenge has been the phenomenal growth and associated mountain of data that's poured into and through the community. I want to identify people such as yourself that be community leaders and be responsible for various activities (even if it only lasts a couple of months). I know many people have a "regular" job and can't sit and participate 100% but any effort helps (like the Dutch forum!)
Hi James, you don't look (comfortably) numb at the photo, hope you keep things moving, so that we don't have the feeling in the forums: "Hello Hello; Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone at home?" Your respons would hopefully be: "Relax, relax, relax. I need some information first.
Just the basic facts. Can you show me where it hurts?" And of course we will end with: "Can you stand up, stand up, stand up.
I do believe it's working good.That’ll keep you going for the show. etc."
A warm welcome and success with the good work!
emoticon My favorite song in fact!
Hi James, Thank you.

It seems that SVN server (svn://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk) is dead. Would you be able to bring it up?

Thanks

Jonas
Seems to work for me Jonas, at least using HTTP (e.g. svn co http://svn.liferay.com/repos/public/portal/trunk lr-foo)

What exactly isn't working for you?

I'll find out what the best solution is for resolving these issues in the future, because it's not me (I don't have admin access to the svn servers to restart anything).
Thanks, James.

It shows me this today only:

"No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
svn: Can't connect to host 'svn.liferay.com': No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.
"
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