Collabpshere 2019 has opened and Graham Acres spoke on behalf of OpenNTF at the OGS.

Graham explained how we are working with HCL to ensure that OpenNTF can support more than just the traditional areas we've been involved in. With OpenCode4Connections we have had a microsite and GitHub repository for some time that has supported Connections resources. And OpenNTF itself has been a repository not only for developer-focused tools but also admin tools, as with the Easy Admin Tools project. We have historically also had Sametime projects and, with the re-emergence of Sametime in V10 and V11, hopefully there will be a renewed focus on Sametime projects.

To enable this, we plan on making some amendments to the projects and releases areas of the site, to enable greater granularity than we've had in the past. Some of this has been in discussion for a while, via the rather small Project Steering Committee and the board. Anyone open to getting involved in this are welcome to contact any of the board members through the OpenNTF Slack or other social media areas.

OpenNTF is still committed to supporting community events, contests and hackathons. And you can expect to see board members visible at many events, maybe more than ever before with Paul Withers joining HCL. I'll take this as an opportunity to remind anyone involved in user groups that we have an open badge available for our community group partners.

Graham also pointed to our Confluence wiki, specifically the nascent Community Guides area - thank you to Roberto Boccadero, Thomas Hampel and Daniel Nashed for the first guide on Domino on Docker.

One other area Graham announced was a new Sandbox server that OpenNTF will be making available, thanks for Prominic, in the near future.

As always, we are looking for people to get involved in all areas. The board is responsible for deciding the way forward, but in our past we have also had specific steering committees for infrastructure IP and more. For OpenNTF to expand across all of the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio, we will need that again in time. And it's never too soon to start. Documentation is a big area and we have had specific spaces on OpenNTF's wiki for certain projects. In more recent years GitHub has provided GitHub Pages for projects, so some projects may prefer that. There are always small useful integrations that could be developed, standalone, like integrations into Slack or GitHub - and no doubt many others we've not thought about. If you want to get some experience, do a bit of personal training around that, and are interested in contributing some functionality for OpenNTF on a specific area, let us know. And there is the #new_ideas channel in OpenNTF if you think there's a project that would be beneficial. We can promote it to help try to form a team, give you a space to discuss scope of the project whether you're wanting to coordinate the project, develop it, do documentation, testing, or just have an idea.

OpenNTF is here as a resource to support the community. This community has always been key to the products, but a community is only as strong as its members. And if the Digital Solutions products grow as we want them to do so, the community and OpenNTF needs to grow as well.



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