JandBeyond 2010

At the Frankfurt airport, waiting for the delayed flight back home…

J and Beyond turned out to be one of the greatest community events I experienced.
The venue – A distant monastery, 20 minutes drive far from a large city, Jesus picture and a bible on every room, pictures of priests on the main hall walls.. typical for a place named after a bishop – Wilhelm Kempf. + the place had a very slow internet connection. It felt weird.

After a couple of hours the first few people arrived, the organizers and a few speakers. Apparently they were already after a few beers, just came from a local bar at Wiesbaden – now it starts to feel like a real tech event… From that moment, the distant isolated place turned a live.

Joomla developers from all over the world, most of them are company owners or self employed making their living from building Joomla websites, extensions or providing consulting (or “trainings” – see Brian Teeman interview from the first day).
It felt like a convention more than it was an event. There were more than 180 people from 27 different countries, 50+ were speakers. Almost everyone already knew each other, at least by avatar or a twitter name.

Community of talented developers and contributors that are in remote communication almost daily. Some have done business together, some are competing with similar extensions – all are very good friends, learning and sharing from their experience. The mixture of geeks, a distant venue, almost no internet connection and large amounts of beer turned out to be a huge success. The usual email writing and mobile phones you regularly see at tech events was replaced with a very attentive audience, lot’s of insights and interesting discussions on every topic from Joomla and technology to politics and life.

During the first day I started making those video interviews as a way to get closer and learn more about the people in the event. The willingness and enthusiasm turned out so high that I wish I had more time to interview more.

I take with me from this event a set of very interesting point of views from the personal experiences of the people behind one of the leading open source projects existed.

Kudus to the guys behind JandBeyond. -If you haven’t been there, do not miss the next year, rumor has it there will be a beach involved…
We at Kaltura were happy to sponsor the broadcasting and video hosting for the event – over more than 3,000 people have watched the live streaming of the event!

* If you’re holding an open source event and would like to live stream or record your event, drop me a note at z.babin on gmail.

Now for the days 2 and 3 interviews (Hover the video and click Share to add the playing video to your site) -

For the iPhone and iPad (Click for the video):