The CodePlex Foundation was announced on September 10, 2009 and I was very honoured to be invited to serve as an interim member of the Board of Directors. To recap, the mission of the CodePlex Foundation is to “enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities”. Over the past 4 months we have worked hard to deliver on that promise, and I would like to believe that my experience in creating and managing a large open source project and community ecosystem has provided value to the Foundation in these early stages.
I have thoroughly enjoyed interacting with the other members of the interim Board and I appreciate the relationships which I have established within this group of highly skilled and professional individuals. Sam Ramji; whom I worked with previously during his tenure as Senior Director of Platform Strategy ( and Open Source ) at Microsoft, assumed the role of President and I have greatly appreciated the leadership, insight, and passion he brought to the Foundation. Bill Staples ( General Manager of Microsoft's Web Platform and Tools Engineering Teams ) is the person who initially invited me to join the interim Board; and I thoroughly enjoyed working with him in a number of areas; especially in regards to pushing the Project Acceptance criteria through to publication. Stephanie Boesch ( Director of Program Management at Microsoft ), Britt Johnston ( Microsoft SQL Business Product Unit Manager ) and Miguel de Icaza ( Vice President of Developer Platform at Novell Inc. ) provided great value in a variety of strategic and functional areas based on their diverse backgrounds. I must also mention that I greatly appreciated the efforts of Mark Stone our Deputy Director, who tirelessly handled the bulk of the more tactical items for the Foundation on a day-to-day basis.
Recently Sam Ramji posted a blog reflecting on the first 120 days of the Foundation; providing his personal assessment of where we met our objectives and where we fell somewhat short. As a Board we had originally made a commitment to a 100 day schedule to achieve certain milestones, and although we came up short in some areas we also delivered more than we expected in others. I am pleased with our progress to date and I am excited as we prepare for the next step in the journey.
Last week we interviewed a number of candidates for the Executive Director and Technical Director positions, and I have to admit I was very excited with the quality of candidates. Some of these folks have already established themselves as respected visionaries in the open source world and the CodePlex Foundation will benefit greatly from their experience, passion, and industry recognition. I would expect our selections to be made public in the coming week.
As a side bar, I would just like to mention that my role as Director of the CodePlex Foundation offers no compensation and I am grateful that Navin Nagiah and the other members of the DotNetNuke Board of Directors have allowed me the time to participate in this opportunity. It has been a personally fulfilling adventure and I really want to see the CodePlex Foundation make some phenomenal progress in 2010.
Before wrapping up, I should also mention that the CodePlex Foundation recently transitioned its website property to DotNetNuke. Engage Software, a DotNetNuke Fusion Partner, helped with the installation, design, and customizations. At this point the site contains minimal content but the plan is to transform it into a more participative experience which will create the foundation for an active community. DotNetNuke is clearly the best platform to accomplish this goal and I am glad the CodePlex Foundation decided to utilize native .NET open source tools.
