Weblogs

Once a year JandBeyond, the international Joomla conference is held in Europe. This time, the venue was, again, the Dolce Hotel in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Elvis Presley lived in Bad Nauheim during his time with the United States Army in Friedberg. 

My initial plan was to meet with Christine (my beloved wife :) ) at JandBeyond, attend the event and drive home together with her. The days before she was in Germany and I was in Switzerland. She prepared the session "Peace, Love and Leadership" and worked the weeks before the event together with the responsible working group on a Proposal for a new Joomla project structure (Discuss the proposal here). She was asked to attend the leadership meeting after the event. Unfortunately it was not possible for her to attend because of some trouble making a decision on behalf of the leadership team so she finally quit her participation.

If you attended jab12 too, please be so kind and add your preferred social media accounts in this Google doc and please post your links to photos in this Google doc.

And now - my story :)

I arrived Friday morning and as part of the video team I had to record sessions.

Over the last few weeks I was working with Allen Langford (@FxNxRl), Jeremy Wilken (@gnomeontherun), Javier Gomez (@JAVI_GOMEZ) and Peter Martin (@pe7er) on a proposal for a new structure for the Joomla Project.

There is a big need for a new leadership structure and for a greater active involvement of the worldwide community.

So we came together and wrote that proposal which we would like to understand as a starting point for an open discussion which finally ends in a common, wise decision about the further direction of the Joomla project.

Read it here, comment, get in contact with the people from the working group, the different leadership teams, discuss it in your local/regional communities!

Letzten Samstag hielt ich eine "halbe" Session auf dem BuchCamp in Frankfurt am 6. Mai 2012 (hier mein Blogeintrag dazu).

Da ich dachte, es ist ein BarCamp und jeder "gibt und nimmt" bot ich an über meine Tätigkeit als "Selfpublishing Autor" zu erzählen (Ich hatte natürlich keine Slides vorbereitet). So sinngemäss mit den Worten:

Ich erzähle euch über meine Arbeit, ihr über eure, und dann gucken wir, was wir zusammen machen können

stellte ich meine Session vor und bekam dann auch tatsächlich einen "halben" Slot am Sonntag morgen um 10 Uhr (was ok war).

Am Wochenende war ich in Frankfurt beim BuchCamp. Ich bin dorthin gefahren, weil ich seit einiger Zeit meine Bücher selbst verlege und einfach neugierig auf die "etablierte" Branche war. Das BuchCamp wurde zum dritten Mal abgehalten, vom Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels organisiert und scheinbar von der BarCamp Idee und dem Buzzword [FügenSieHierIhreBrancheEin]Camp inspiriert. Es fand auf dem MediaCampus Frankfurt statt, eine Schule für angehende Buchhändler.

Da ich mich normalerweise auf eher technisch orientierten Events befinde, war ich doppelt neugierig, was mich so erwartet.

Individual versus group needs and where do I fit in?

The Joomla Day New England was the second Joomla Day I attended and the first where I gave a presentation. It seems that I hit the nail with my topic as there were lively discussions during and after my session and I was asked to write everything down.

So here it is ;-)

I consult and coach different kind of companies regarding their organizational structure and guide them to develop and implement necessary changes. Doing this I use the methods of Transactional Analysis (TA), a psychological theory, based on psycho-analysis and psychotherapy.

It is used in counselling, organization development, education and psychotherapy. There is a set of models which helps to understand why we think, feel and act like we do, to trace behavioural patterns and ways of thinking, reflect on these and learn to develop alternatives, that will lead to a change of the everyday (working) life.

I am not directly involved in the Joomla project nor do I have strong relations to many members, I just got in contact with some of them and, from my outside standpoint, I was looking with my TA eyes at the visible processes of the Joomla project.

April 12th Christine and me attended the first Joomla!Day in Mashhad, Iran.

The JoomlaDay team around Saeed worked one year to make this event possible. Due to ongoing sanctions against Iran it was not possible for Open Source Matters to support the event with 500 US$ as they usually do for an official Joomla!Day. I announced the event personally in several chats, meetings and JoomlaDays (last time in New England) but people had concerns about the political situation and often fear to get involved in that. For our company cocoate which is based in France exists regulations too that make it impossible to support the event financially. At the end of the day we decided to have a look by ourselves, fly to Iran and attend the event.

First problem was to figure out how to get a visa. For getting a visa you need a confirmation of a hotel reservation with a price in. Especially in Mashhad the hotel staff speak Farsi and Arabic but very little English. Confirming a price longer than a few weeks/days is hard for them because of a rising inflation in the last months. At least we found the Bahram Hotel which is located near Iman Reza shrine and near the house where Ali Khamenei سید علی حسینی خامنهای  was born.

We had to add our names to a list of the German "Auswärtiges Amt" and they told us to be very careful, don't take personal computers, cameras and other equipment with us and several more security advices. It is not possible to use our credit cards in Iran so we had to bring in cash for the hotel and our expenses. The money has to be changed somewhere (be careful when carrying high amounts of cash in your pocket ...).

We got more and more unsure whether it was a good idea to go to Iran but the curiosity and the hope that people are nearly the same in the whole world was still bigger.

The frontpage of cocoate was in the past a mixture of different languages.

Today I separated the content of the frontpage depending of the language you have configured with the language switcher.

The default language of cocoate is English. If your browser is tied to a special language these language should appear as default for you. E.g. if your default browser language setting is French, the French cocoate frontpage should appear.

We have a possibility to set a content "Language neutral". It will be shown in each language like this blog entry.

A lot of the old content is still "language neutral". I will change that in the next days.

Ok, to understand my thoughts you have to spend a bit time, follow the links and watch the videos and sources I linked to (or may be not, if you know them all).
I know it's complicate and it takes time, but the world isn't that easy :)

Step by step

• January 18th
  The whole world protested against a law in the US (SOPA/PIPA).
• January 19th 10am:
  Apple held an event about spreading iPads in schools (Video).
  Concerning the iPad platform, have a look at that video Cory Doctorow: The coming war on general computation [28C3] (from Dec. 2011)
• January 19th 11pm:
  I read that the Police in New Zealand arrested Kim Dotcom (Schmitz), Bram van der Kolk, Finn Batato and Mathias Ortman and shut down the servers of their company megaupload (Press Release FBI: Justice Department Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement).