Connecting the European OpenLaszlo Community
Open source is big in Europe so it's not surprising that a large number of the OpenLaszlo developers world wide are from Europe. Right now we have strong community activity in France, German, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and the UK. But much of that activity is not really interconnected, and that needs to change! A first step was the creation of the European OpenLaszlo Google group, which followed the discussion Quirino and I had about the community development in Europe. Quirino Zagarese has been extremely active in Italy, promoting OpenLaszlo, seting up the forums and evangelizing OpenLaszlo. Thanks Quirino, for setting up the European OpenLaszlo Google group. The next step will be a European OpenLaszlo Community Meeting which will be held in December 2007 (the exact date and city will be published here shortly).
I don't expect any technical discussion in the European OpenLaszlo group, but a lot more socializing then we see in the commnity right now. You are looking for freelancers or companies offering OpenLaszlo services? We'll have a list of companies in Europe offering professional services, a page showing all OpenLaszlo applications deployed in Europe, a group calendar with all events around OpenLaszlo in Europe. Hey, and if you just looked at the list of applications and your's is missing, join the group, edit the page and enter the new application. This is a community effort, and if you are interested in helping with updating the pages, the calendar and organizing events, just send a message out to the group.
I'm really looking forward to a first meeting of the European community. There are so many OpenLaszlo fans, which I've never met, but we have been in contact through mails, blog posts and chat. I personally believe that within two years the European OpenLaszlo community will be bigger then the community in the U.S. The European Union and each of the national governments finance a huge number of high-tech projects using open source technology. I see good chances for OpenLaszlo in these projects, esspecially with the DHTML runtime, the current IPTV boom and the great interest in mobile Ajax technology. We might be in good old Europe, but Europe is leading the open source revolution right now.