J and Beyond 2011 Netherlands - Day 1

May 6th, 2011 at 10:30 PM CEST in Events

Today is the first day of the biggest European Joomla! Event: J & Beyond 2011. Currently I'm typing on a borrowed MacBook Pro, with a nice (eBay sponsored!) free beer in front of me. Having filled my belly with some extraordinary BBQ food, this marked a great moment to recap day 1.

First impressions of Rolduc

The venue this year is the Rolduc in Kerkrade (The Netherlands). While most Joomla! Conferences are held in modern conference rooms, the Rolduc is a former monastery, complete with actual nuns! The first view of the venue was a nice rocky path with grass lawns beside them and a castle-like structure up ahead. Nice!

Keynote – The mobile Cloud Opportunity by Tony Guntharp

The keynote presentation of J&Beyond 2011 was held by one of the co-founders of Sourceforge. Having arrived early, I decided to get back outside to catch some of the (very much present and appreciated!) sun. There I met up with some friends I knew from Twitter and quicky realised there was much more to JAB than just presentations. I felt lucky about this, because the actual presentation by Tony kind of disappointed me. It was about using the 'Titanium' framework to leverage the cloud for mobile application, and was in my opinion way too targeted to a small percentage of visitors, and quite unrelated to Joomla as well! While this might have been a nice track speech, I think the keynote speech of an event should be both energizing and at least appeal to the majority of the audience. I wondered why they haven't put Ryan out there? I'm sure his Prodent smile and triple espresso presentation style (which are both meant as a compliment!) would've motivated me more than the current keynote, but maybe that's just me.

Lunch time

Continuing the success of the great lunches at the Joomladays Netherlands, JAB served top quality food as well. In the nicely decorated dinner room, friendly chatter was going on, with the word Joomla being called out about twice every sentence. My sincere compliments go out to the bakery, that actually produced fresh bread this time, unlike my bad experiences with the bread at JD11NL! At the table we had a German (Drupal!) extension developer that that was spying on the Joomla! community. So far the challenge set out by Brian Teeman is going well!

6 minute lightning talks

These presented the opportunity to have a place on the podium, with a large audience in the Aula Major, since there were no other talks planned simultaneously. I was hoping to see short talks about new ideas, discrete plans that would provoke thoughts and be discussed further during the course of JAB. Instead, what we've got was one pretty nice presentation about a comparison of missionary missions abroad and open source software development, a call for the Google Summer of Code and pretty much four or five product presentations following it. Seriously, can anyone point out in detail (yet in few words) what the presentation from the Italians was about? Their sheets were filled with nearly as many words as my thesis, but neither I nor others I spoke to have really gotten the point that they were trying to get across. The suggestion I heard 'at the watercooler' to have a small comittee of visitors equiped with bright red “you're out” button sounded quite great to me actually. These short talks could offer a great opportunity for people with less material than a full blown talk, or just willing to provoke some thoughts, instead they were turned into glorified product presentation sessions, which is a pity as far as I'm concerned.

Long break

Although I've heard some rumors about revelations made at the Molajo talk, I'd decided to spend a nice session in the sun. This actually turned out to become a fun part of the day. When Fotis walked by, I thought it was a great moment to ask him about my proposed talks for the upcoming Joomladay Greece. While I was under the impression that my sessions were still in the 'proposed' section (that Greek site is hard to read!), it appears both (or at least one, I'm not entirely sure yet) of my talks have been accepted! Guess it is time to get myself a plane ticket and hotel then! Walking through the hotel after having been denied access to the WiFi for too many times, me and my collegue Robin Poort ran into Ryan Ozimek. He was standing at the bottom of a stairway waving his iPad around, claiming this was 'the best spot for WiFi!'. Long story short: we helped him move all the benches from the courtyard to a a nice stretch of grass, where he later held his presentation on the State of OSM, which was a nice little twist.

The State of OSM Address by Ryan Ozimek

I personally like Ryan as a speaker. His unorthodox style of presenting (this time on the grass, without a PowerPoint presentation, reading from his iPad that was pretty much illegible due to the sunlight) intrigues me. In the talk Ryan told us about the current state of OSM. It seems they are doing pretty well, having completed the past financial year with nice black numbers rather than red ones. They've also turned over almost 90% of their board, which in combination with external help from a organization development consultant resulted in a far more organized and streamlined group of people. While I've held different thoughts on this subject in the past (especially when it took OSM over 3 months to accept our trademark request), I must say I actually have faith in the current group of people in OSM.

Cloud Management by Dinh Viet Hung

Lacking a clear introduction I cannot be sure about the following, but I think it actually wasn't Dinh Viet Hung giving the majority of the presentation. While I was looking forward to this presentation - by template giant JoomlArt - it actually disappointed me. The black-on-white PowerPoint didn't seem to have been made by the same guys that have been building revolutionary templates for so many years. While I acknowledge there might be some kind of cultural difference in the presentation style, I wouldn't mind a slightly more 'put your chin up'  approach to presenting than what we've seen this afternoon. I mean, we've all come to your talk, show us you love what you're talking about! Teach us something new! Give us small steps or provocative thoughts we can work on after your presentation! To my shame I have to admit I actually left this presentation before it ended, because it was almost ten minutes past the ending time, and there wasn't an end in sight at all. Please, to all speakers reading this: plan your talk and end it within the set timeframe, or at least indicate us that your answering your final question(s) when you've passed the deadline.

Social event sponsored by eBay

Once again thanks for the free beer eBay, the two glasses I've had while writing this blog tasted great! ;-)

See you tomorrow for another day of JAB!