OpenCode4Connections Contest Winners

Paul Withers | 2 days ago | Comments
Earlier this week, at Social Connections, we announced the winners of the OpenCode4Connections IBM Connections Customizer contest. To support the contest there was a great amount of effort from Christian Guedemann, Martin Donnelly and others to set up the infrastructure and enablement materials to help ensure the contest was a success. Even though the contest only ran for a short period of time, the numbers were impressive:

- over 40 organisations were provisioned by IBM during the pilot phase
- 20 organisations developed or partially developed something for the contest
- there were 11 submissions which went to voting and you can see all repositories on OpenCode4Connections' GitHub.

The winners were:

Enhanced Activity Stream - Jay Agrawal
This project contributed a notifier and infinite scroll to the Activity Stream in Connections and was something Jay had previously built as custom code in the header.jsp of the homepage of Connections and extended into the Connections Customizer. As the ReadMe says, by taking the code you can also add this functionality to a Connections 5+ instance. Jay is also a first-time contributor to OpenNTF, so it's great to be expanding our contributor-base.

activity-stream.jpg

Status Update Tone Analyzer - John Jardin
This project is a very unobtrusive contribution which analyzes the tone of the status update, allowing the user to review before posting. The status is analyzed in intervals of 2 seconds while the update is typed. In the screenshot below it's been highlighted because, as I'm sure you can tell, it blends well with the rest of the content around it.

tone-analyzer.jpg

Bluemix Weather Widget / Watson Workspace Links - Brian Gleeson
The first project adds a weather widget to the community overview page of a chosen community, based on the community's UUID entered in the JSON. If you want it to apply to all communities, the "match" property of the json can be removed. This points to an XPages application running on Bluemix and the Weather Company data from Bluemix and is a great example of integrating all these technologies into Connections.

weather.jpg

The second project again can be contributed to a specific community using the UUID or to all communities, by removing the "match" property. This allows posting to a Watson Workspace defined in a watsonSpaceId property. You'll also need to set up a Watson Workspace App, adding the appId and appSecret to the JS file.

workspace-connections.jpg
workspace.jpg

Floyd - Daniele Vistalli
A special award was given to Daniele Vistalli who contributed not a customization per se but a framework for running applications or webpages, loading CSS etc. This allows you to add customizations more easily.
floyd.jpg

Open Badges
Some time ago OpenNTF investigated the use of Open Badges to reward those who get involved with us. It's something we first became aware of when IBM issued them to IBM Champions, but for various reasons we've not been in a position to progress it. However, this contest gave us the opportunity to issue the first Open Badge, to our winners. You'll notice the badge features a laurel wreath (in pink, the colour associated with the current developments around IBM Connections) around the new OpenCode4Connections logo. Thank you to our contest winners for their patience with our faltering steps on this new journey!
open-badge.jpg

We'll be rolling Open Badges out wider during the coming months for various initiatives and you will see how we will vary the badges for our different brands.

OpenNTF Board of Directors

Paul Withers | 3 weeks ago | Comments
The new OpenNTF board has been elected by acclamation.

The following have been elected Member Directors, returned for two years:

Martin Donnelly - IBM
Paul Withers - Intec Systems Ltd
Oliver Busse -  We4IT
Nathan T Freeman - Red Pill Now

They join the Member Directors elected last year, who have one year left on their term:

Serdar Basegmez, Developi Information Systems
Adam Foster, Oval
Jesse Gallagher, I Know Some Guys
Christian Güdemann, Webgate
Douglas Robinson, Prominic

The following have been elected as Contributor Directors, the term for which is one year:

Padraic Edwards
Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling

We would like to welcome Nina to the board and we look forward to the year ahead. A number of new initiatives are planned and there will be opportunities for people to get involved over the coming months to help drive the organisation forward.

In the meantime, I would recommend everyone to take a look at the OpenCode4Connections and IBM Connections Customiser contest. The level of technical enablement is something that we have all been working to improve over previous contests, and there are now four videos to allow you to hit the ground running.

Say hello to "OpenCode4Connections.org"

Christian Guedemann | 1 month ago | Comments
A picture named M2 

We at OpenNTF.org are excited to launch our new brand - OpenCode4Connections.org.
OpenNTF has a proven track history in building open source communities around interesting technologies and products, e.g. it was the incubinator for the success of XPages. But let us welcome our newest member:

OpenCode4Connections.org

The intention behind OpenCode4Connections.org is a very simple and short story! IBM Connections deserves a dedicated place where the Open Source Community can meet and collaborate in a creative way to build solutions and fix problems!

To celebrate the start of OpenCode4Connections.org we have decide to organize the IBM Connections Customizer Contest. Learn more about it here!

Have fun!

Christian