Community 2010: A Building Wave

2010 is going to be a great season for the DotNetNuke Community.  Over the course of the last few months many foundational changes have occurred upon which much is building.  Large ocean waves begin with ripples unnoticed in the deep, but as they approach the shore they are magnified.  And I can’t help but draw the comparison as I look forward to this season like an expectant surfer!

So what’s been happening that could possibly foreshadow such a season of accomplishment?  I thought I would outline just a few things and see if we can connect a few of the larger dots.

• Reorganization of the team.  Way back in the fall, the “core team” reorganized from an unwieldy mass of folks into 6 more targeted “Community Teams”.  Each of these teams has a specific area of charter and activities that not only contribute to the DotNetNuke application directly, but the general care and health of the community in general. Main areas of concentration include: Forge, Reference, Quality, Internationalization, Experience and Health.
   
• Peer Esteem Grant. In an unprecedented act of stewardship, DotNetNuke Corporation gave stock grants to 20 esteemed contributors selected solely by the contributors themselves.
   
• A Few New Team Members.  In addition to the team members already blogged about, we’ve begun working with a few other names that you’ll soon see associated with the team such as: Jeroen van Menen, the initiator and lead developer of the popular Watin project for automated web application testing; Kevin Boles, a SQL MVP at SolidQ Mentors; and several others. Expect a few more this year... and consider volunteering yourself!
   
• Designer Challenge Skinning Contest.  Timo Breumelhof, Cuong Dang, Salar Golestanian and the whole DNN Experience team coordinated our second ever skinning contest which will become an annual event culminating in a skin gallery showcasing designers and providing public resources.
   
• telerik integration. This feature of the core is new enough to still be considered a sleeper but will be a catalyst for many changes in the user experience of DotNetNuke users everywhere, including www.dotnetnuke.com.
   
• Initial Gallery Launch.  Bill Severance, Matthias Schlomann & Néstor Sanchez brought the Gallery module, long neglected, up to date with many improvements to follow!
   
• Open Repository.  After years of open source, but closed source control… we’ve opened up our maintenance repository at Codeplex for public browsing. There are many potential points of external integration as a result and it guides the way for some interesting developments around our own DotNetNuke Forge and associated Codeplex projects!
   
• Forum Upgrade.  After almost two years of challenges, Chris Paterra has not only given us an enormous face lift, but also greatly improved functionality and integration with the core platform.  We continue to work on incremental releases and deeper integration and continually improving performance.
   
• Major Blog Upgrade in Beta.  As a foundational module, the importance of Blog cannot be overlooked.  Antonio and his team (Don Worthley, Dario Rossa, Rip Rowan, Eoghan O'Neill) have done and amazing job with this update… stay tuned!
   
• Making use of User Profile Properties (User Avatar).  Use of the User Profile Avatar in forums is just a foretaste on increased integration within DotNetNuke and on www.dotnetnuke.com.  Expect several community oriented implementations of these features in the coming weeks and months!
   
• Taxonomy / Folksonomy.  A pending feature of our next release, this brings site wide categorization and vocabularies to module developers with every interesting possibilities.  For specific application, consider the DotNetNuke Forge and Snowcovered integration possibilities!
   
• Localization Tools.  Peter Donker and the Localization team have been preparing for many months a strategy to encourage both participation in localization efforts as well as provide value to users and contributors. These efforts are in pilot stages and have great promise for building a strong international posture for DotNetNuke.
   
• Infrastructure Maturity.  If you’re at all familiar with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), you’ll understand some of the challenges of moving from an “organized” project to a mature development organization.  With the addition of resources, personnel and processes (to support both the product and the company), our capability and capacity has improved drastically in the past year. 
   

And this is only a partial list.  There are many, many other things happening beneath the surface of the water, farther out in the deep, gathering momentum which will “hit the beach” in 2010.  As we finish our own planning, both corporately and among the Community Teams, there will be more and more to share.  But as I believe you can see, there is a lot of substantial and coordinated movement going on.

Grab your board… and let’s get ready to ride the DotNetNuke wave in 2010!