OpenNTF Alliance Steering Committee Meeting Minutes - May 4, 2010

Members: Bruce Elgort (Chairman), Vince Schuurman (absent), Nathan Freeman (absent), Ludwig Nastansky, Justin Hill, John Head, Brent Peters(absent), Scott Johnsen, Corey Davis

Others Present: Arthur Fontaine, Peter Tanner (absent), Niklas Heidloff

Proceedings:

General Business – John Head

The attorney is doing the paper work. A first draft has been done and back for revisions. Next draft will go to the steering committee. This document will be prepared for the level of scope for the legal language. We will need a 1-2 page overview document for the community.

Strategy Working Group – Nathan Freeman

No update at this time.

IP Working Group - John Head

We need to get the strategy piece around User Groups done. The OpenNTF presentation for User Groups is done. (Do we have a list of all the user groups?)

Technical Committee – Niklas

The statistics – April was not the best month, but it was still strong. New releases from IBM and non-IBM are now in the catalogue. Trend is that a lot more non-IBM’ers are contributing than ever before.

Marketing Working Group – Scott Johnsen There have been a number goals expressed by various members of the Steeting Committee. With so few resources, it is difficult to focus on a large number of objectives. Instead, it would be better to focus only on 2 or 3. If that is the case, which strategic goals should we focus on?

Recommendations
  • + Increase the usage of the projects that are out there. High profile companies using projects, get more companies using these projects will start modifying projects, feeding into the other goals.
  • + Get individuals to create case studies. Increase the usage about the independent developers and reward them for their efforts.
  • + Many companies “own the work” of their employees, regardless of when that work is done. Corporations can sign an agreement that their employees can work on projects for groups such as OpenNTF. Their contributions can be submitted via Apache or Eclipse. The biggest impediment to getting contributions from many of these people is getting the corporate sign off on these documents.
  • + More pragmatic approach to grow the individual contributor approach. We will get more customers consuming this code by making it easier for reference points. (Success Stories, case studies, contests, etc.)
  • + How can we give them more incentive to contribute code?
  • + Grow # of contributors and amount of code.
  • + References are hard. We need to prioritize and go with it. User Groups – Has OpenNTF been involved in user groups? Vince at UKLUG, Bruce/John at MidwestLUG, Niklas at DNUG, EntwicklerCamp. Are there other events that we could participate in to get new, younger audiences?

This will be posted in order to get feedback from the community.

Meeting adjourned at 12:00 am ET
Minutes submitted by Scott Johnsen
Next meeting:
Tuesday, June 1, 2010 (May 18 meeting was postponed.)
11:00 am ET
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