Announcing the New Board of Directors

Paul Withers | 3 weeks ago | Comments
It's a pleasure to announce the new OpenNTF board. We already have five Member Directors who still have one year left on their tenure:

Christian Güdemann
Adam Foster
Jesse Gallagher
SerdarBasegmez
Doug Robinson

The following Member Directors have been elected to a two-year tenure starting this year:

Paul Withers
Dan Dumont
Oliver Busse
Graham Acres (moving up from Contributor Director)

The following Contributor Directors have been elected for a year:

Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Howard Greenberg

The new board will take up their positions on 3rd October, when we will also elect the Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary positions.

Call for Nominations for OpenNTF Board of Directors

Paul Withers | 1 month ago | Comments
With Social Connections just around the corner and the Collabsphere agenda recently announced, it's the time of year when we issue our call for directors.

There are four Member Director posts up for election this year. Any employee of a Member company is eligible to apply and the posts run for a two-year term. The following Member Directors terms are currently expiring:

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

The terms of the three Contributor Directors are also expiring. Anyone with an ICLA or CCLA can apply for the post, which has a one-year term. The current incumbents are:

Nina Wittich
Fredrik Norling
Graham Acres

Anyone interested in standing submit their names and a candidate statement to ip-manager at openntf.org.

The election schedule will be:
- Nominations open until 20th September
- Voting from 21st September to 27th September
- Winners take office on 3rd October

Collabsphere 2019 Beauty Contest

Paul Withers | 3 months ago | Comments
Yesterday Richard Moy announced a new contest to provide a modern user experience for DMA to a traditional Notes template.

After contest in recent years for Connections Customizer and XPages, now is the right time to engage with LotusScript and Formula Language developers and re-energise that community around open source.

There are many developers who never made the jump to XPages and may not make the leap to the App Dev Pack. But IBM and HCL's launch of DMA has brought an additional entry point to Notes Client applications. HCL's work on iPhone and Android (tablet and phone) DMA apps with expand that reach across the two main mobile platforms. And with V11 the lightweight client is likely to bring Notes Client applications to any modern browser. Applications built with traditional design elements, LotusScript and Formula Language can have a greater reach than ever before. And OpenNTF is still here ready to embrace those open source samples to wow users and educate developers.

But most client applications on OpenNTF have not had a facelift in a decade. And the facelift given to the core templates is not one that works outside the Eclipse client. The world has moved on, expectations have changed, and it's time for applications to modernise as well. Technology is not a barrier to user experience. Just because it's Notes doesn't mean it can't be fresh, as Theo Heselmans showed with his Wine Tasting App. Paul Withers also delivered a session at Engage earlier this year on modernising applications including adding a DMA interface to the XPages Extension Library database. There is a blog post going into more detail.

So while you're waiting for the template to be selected and the start of the contest, take a look at these and think about innovative approaches.

Once the contest starts, there will be people available to act as mentors for teams. And the template itself will be packaged with the relevant license and notice files, plus starter markdown documentation file, ready for final deployment to OpenNTF. If teams want a GitHub repository setting up under OpenNTF for source control, we can do so. We also advise on issues templates / feature request templates / CLA process integration on GitHub.