Dion Almaer wrote yesterday a blog entry with a list of criteria that, in his opinion, make an open source project truly community-driven (which is, of course, a Good Thing(tm)).

I had some apprehension, while reading the blog entry’s title, because, of course, we want to be community-driven (that’s one of the criteria BTW), but what if we had forgotten something important?

Fortunately, the short answer is “of course we are community-driven”. With Dion’s criteria, I can confidently self-grade us at A+ (or 20/20, for french-educated people). Here are the criteria and my comments:

If you don’t have any commiters from outside of your company. You probably aren’t community driven.

Half of the commiters in the Nuxeo project are not Nuxeo employees, and we are actively trying to recruit more contributors.

If you didn’t spend time cleaning up documentation for the community when you opened it up. You probably aren’t community driven.

We’ve produced already several hundreds of pages of users and developers documentation, and we’ve gone through great efforts in producing this documentation in time for the first public releases of the software.

If your users haven’t helped with the documentation if it is lacking. You probably aren’t community driven.

We got great feedback from our users regarding the documentation, and we’ve already had user-contributed sections in some of our manuals.

If you do not have some kind of forums/lists where people help each other out. You probably aren’t community driven.

We have several mailing lists for all of our projects, with a total of about 1500 subscribers.

If you aren’t willing to put in a lot of effort to build your community to get true benefits. You probably aren’t community driven.

Yes, we’re putting a lot of efforts, and we get the rewards of course.

But there is something more important, that is not explicitly stated in Dion’s criteria: we have designed the Nuxeo software with the explicit goal of creating an Architecture of Participation (a term coined by Tim O’Reilly, Dion’s boss, BTW). Our creation of Nuxeo Runtime, the OSGi-based plugin system (inspired by Eclipse’s), our use of a component framework like JBoss Seam for our webapp, are consequences of this vision, which comes from years of experience working with system integrators and ISV.

Extensibility at all levels is one of the majors criteria of a successful historical open source project (think Eclipse’s or Mozilla’s plugins, Emacs scripts, LaTeX packages, etc.). Monolithic apps usually don’t make great open source communities. That’s a lesson we will never forget!

As some people know already, I have participated in the creation of Ouverture (né “Open Source Valley”), the Competitiveness cluster dedicated to Free and Open Source Software in the Paris area.

We are still waiting for the official stamp of the French Government, which will start the operational life of the cluster by bringing Government funding to R&D projects carried out by the cluster’s members: public research labs, universities and companies. Since there seems to be some, let’s say “bureaucratic delays”, we had decided to start some activities that don’t depend on the official stamp, namely bringing together all the cluster’s participants to brainstorm ideas for projects that would be later submitted to the cluster.

This first event was christened “BrainCamp 2007” and happened today at ENSTA, a Parisian engineering school that has been a pionneer in the use of open source software in higher education in France.

Like every SME that participated in this BrainCamp, I had 5 minutes to present Nuxeo to the other participants: about 15 research labs, 20 SMEs (including the biggest names in the French open source market: Mandriva, Idealx, Linagora, XWiki, etc.) and 4 big companies (which happen, can you believe it, to be all partners of Nuxeo: Capgemini, Unilog, CS, Sun).

My point was to present the most innovative aspects of the Nuxeo 5 project: its use of Nuxeo Runtime to develop modular applications that target both application servers and rich clients, the Nuxeo Core embeddable document management core, and the Nuxeo EP and Nuxeo RCP platforms. Hence we are looking for partners that would like to work with us on all kind of levels:

• Nuxeo Runtime: either developers of other kinds of enterprise software (ERP, CRM, Enterprise Wikis…) that would want to benefit from the modularity and extensibility that it provides, or people who would want to work with us on targeting other deployment platforms than JBoss AS 4 and Eclipse (we’re specially looking for volunteers for helping with porting Nuxeo Runtime to JBoss 5, JOnAS 5, Geronimo, Glassfish, for instance).

• Nuxeo Core: developers that who would like to extend to core with new kinds of document storages than the JCR, for instance a RDBMS (via Hibernate), an OODBMS (like db4o) or an XML database, add application-level replication / synchronization, etc.

• Business components developers that would extend the platform with more specialized components.

• Vertical application developers that would base their software on the Nuxeo platform (we already have a bunch of companies we are working with on this matter).

• Other kinds of applications developers (ex: CRM, ERP, etc.) that would want either to embed Nuxeo as a document management core in their system (this makes completely sense for a system like a CRM that has to manage document besides more structured data) or just connect Nuxeo to their software.

For those who prefer slides, here they are:

Or as a PDF file, if you prefer.

If you are interested in collaborating with us, either contact me (sf@nuxeo.com), or join the mailing list.