Liferay 2011 Community Excellence Awards

In addition to the annual "Partner of the Year" award, this year Liferay recognized its partners for their community achievements, awarding the Community Excellence Award.  We consider partners a valuable part of our community (just like we do with "regular" liferay.com denizens, Liferay's employees, and Liferay customers), and wanted to recognize their participation, independent of any revenue figures, deals closed, or any other other business factors.

What We Measured

The actual, super-secret formula has not been revealed in orer to keep things fair, but the formula involves several (over 20) contribution types, including the obvious ones like helpful forum posts (answers) and code contributions, but other non-obvious, yet highly valuable community metrics.  For the 2011 awards, we considered activity that occured between midnight, August 31st, 2010 and midnight, August 1st, 2011.

The Winners

The winning partners have a proven, well-rounded, and highly effective track record of being involved in the community and giving back.  They realize the benefits of open participation: 1) It ultimately helps their business operate more effeciently, because they are more knowledgable, 2) It improves their standing with other community members and clients, because they are seen as having the expertise enough to be able to help others, and 3) It moves the technology forward, by offering innovation that we alone cannot provide.

Here they are:

MIMACOM

MIMACOM is a leading provider in Europe for Enterprise Open Source solutions based on Java.  Headquartered in Bern, with offices in Zurich, Valencia, Stuttgart, and Rome, MIMACOM also makes regular contributions to projects other than Liferay, including ICEfaces, Spring, and Hibernate.  In 2010-2011, MIMACOM was particularly helpful with the 6.0 release (doing much pre-release testing), contributed plugins, and established the Austria and Slovakia user groups.

 

Savoir-faire Linux

Founded in 1999 with locations in Montreal, Quebec City, and Ottawa, Savoir-faire Linux is the reference for open-source software integration. They are the largest and most experienced Liferay integrator in Eastern Canada.  In 2010-2011, Savoir-faire contributed a huge number of open source plugins, and worked closely with the community and Liferay engineering to implement and document the faceted search feature in 6.1.  They also contributed many fixes for the 6.1 release, and we are delighted to have them be part of it all.

 

IBA CZ

IBA CZ is a fast growing IT service provider and development center of the IBA Group headquartered in the Czech Republic. They focus on up-to-date technologies including enterprise portals, enterprise Java, Business Intelligence, and Business Process Management to customers located in Central and Western Europe.  In 2010-2011, IBA CZ was very active in reporting and providing contributions for issues, participated in 100 papercuts, BugSquad, and Community Verifier, and established the Czech Republic User Group.

 

CIGNEX Datamatics

Based in Santa Clara, CIGNEX Datamatics is the world's leading provider of Open Source Enterprise Content Management and SOA & ESB consulting services and software solutions. Their customers include companies in the Media, Healthcare, Education, Government, Gaming and High Tech industry. In 2010-2011, the team had consistent community contributions in many different areas (forum answers, bug reports, plugin contributions, and more) owing to their Liferay Platform expertise.   They also hold 1 of only 4 coveted "Liferay Legend" status indicators.

 

Componence

With locations in Nederland, Ukraine and India, Componence has offered Internet, Social Media and Mobile solutions since 2001. With over 200 portal implementations, Componence is portal market leader in the Netherlands with technology focus on Java and portal.  In 2010-2011, Componence contributed plugins, established the Netherlands User Group, participated in BugSquad, 100 PaperCuts, Community Verifier, and holds 1 of only 4 coveted "Liferay Legend" status indicators. 

 

A big "Thank You!" and congratulations goes to all of our 2011 Community Excellence Award winners!

How Can We Win Next Year?

Think about how participation in Liferay's open source community can help you (see the above winners for some ideas).  Rather than taking an ad-hoc approach, build in community participation into your business model and resourcing plans.  Value will organically flow into the community and back to you in various tangible ways.  For example, you fix a bug, provide a translation, develop and contribute a new feature, or investigate and solve someone else's problem on the forums.  You have helped the community, and without knowing it, got trained in the process!  How cool is that?

 

Blogues
So why was the decision made to only acknowledge partners ? Many contributions are made by people that have no formal affiliation with Liferay. (hitoshi ?)
originally it was 'community partner of the year' to be the non-monetary version of the partner of the year, then we renamed it to make it sound better, and lost a little in the widening conversion emoticon I am working on something similar for individuals for next year (aside from the acknowledgements and prizes currently available through community programs).