The eZ Publish Community Project Board is nearing renewal, we need applicants

On Thursday February 17th 2011 the eZ Publish Community Project Board introduced itself to the Community at large. After 16 meetings, 10 builds of eZ Publish Community Project, a one-year term and a lot of accomplishments behind it, it is now time to renew the current Board as planned in the governance document.

Nearing the end of the first term

The board is composed of three members from eZ Systems  and three members from the community. The members from eZ Systems represent Engineering, Professional Services and the Community Management team, and the members from the Community should be representative of the eZ Publish market and geographical distribution.
 
Along with the other members of the board you help build and guide the eZ Publish Community through Openness & Innovation. The responsibilities of the Board and a list of criteria which need to be fulfilled to be a board member are listed in the governance document. Per-applicant criteria apply, as well as cross-board ones.
 
If you think you meet those criteria, and are an absolute fan of Open Source and eZ Publish, make sure you apply ! You can apply by either commenting under this post or directly through our contact-form: http://share.ez.no/authorcontact/form/111598.
 
Applications will close on March 2nd. Voting will happen shortly after by the current Board members, and results published immediately.

Major achievements and ongoing initiatives

To give you some idea of our tasks and what we have worked on the past year, you find a list of achievements below:

• Set-up of the Governance framework
• Setup of eZ Publish Community Project build policy, release scheme and naming,
• Set-up of the Board's communication scheme
• Wording of the Board's mission statement
• Automating the eZ Publish Community Project builds
• Create a distribution for the Microsoft Web Matrix platform
• Further open up contribution to the code source through the use of Git and in specific provide a tutorial on this subject for the community
• Deliver a new Get Involved section for the community portal
• Empowerment of public feature-ideas collection : eZ Roadmap
• Evangelism in numerous Tech/PHP conferences (IPC, IPCse, DPC, PHP Tour, PHP UK)
• Windows Platform Installer for eZ Publish created,
• Lead on the two annual translation campaigns,
• Coding standards initiative,Realization and launch of the Event planner, easing face to face meetings of the Community (together with the share.ez.no team)
• Revamped API documentation platform,
• Bundling of new extensions in the eZ Publish Project Builds

With a new year ahead of us the new board will be looking at creating continuity with the current board's endeavors, but also develop new initiatives. As an indication, we have listed our top 3 ideas for the next term :

• Streamline and accelerate collaborative innovation on larger product features,
• Revamp of the download section on share.ez.no
• Engage the community through more local events. A great example of this, is the new North American user group
• Revamp the eZ Publish extension forge
• Screencast of the Web Matrix package usage
• Deliver a new tutorial helping Git/Github beginners to contribute : "The Ideal pull-request"
• Deliver a new tutorial explaining how to install an eZ Publish development set-up, from github.

They wanted to tell you something

Some of the Board members wanted to share open their membership experience, to give potential applicant a sharper overview of what this means :

Robin Muilwijk

I am an Open Source enthusiast, ever since 2003 when I learned more about Open Source CMS's and started using these. It's in my nature to give back, to share, so I also started contributing back to the communities and projects I was using the software from. I have been involved in a few project for the last 9 years, first Joomla, now eZ Publish. For me it's a way to contribute, have fun, meet people that are also interested and working with Open Source. Oh, and learn, a lot! By being a member of the Board I can also help steer and build the community I strongly believe in.

Gilles Guirand

Participating to the Community Project Board truly is a personal achievement after all the way walked since my first eZ Publish training (by @jeanvoye) … to finally envisage the very challenge : conciliating a daily professional activity and contribution to the development of a growing Open-source community. This personal engagement, this unlimited sharing, allow me to consider differently an activity that is both social and professional : one single "community" activity at the center of all, focused on sharing, developing a CMS and its ecosystem, with full confidence in the positive outcome for my company and my personal development. This investment could be summed-up with the following keywords : learn, share, evolve and benefit from this, naturally.

Nicolas Pastorino

"The eZ Community Project Board mission is to lead the community, facilitate collaboration between the community and eZ Systems and to foster innovation of the eZ Publish content management platform". This mission-statement, the Board's, reflects an essential trait of Open-source that first dragged me towards eZ and eZ Publish, 7 years back : Innovation. Being a member of the Community Project Board makes you an integral part of the "heart of the engine", in a multicultural and multidisciplinary team that tenfolds the excitement of participating in an Open-source project : the team fast-tracks the Product AND the Community to their next evolution steps. Massive adoption and bleeding-edgeness are the mottos.