Joomla! at CeBIT 2014 - Big Business!
From March 10 - 14, CeBit, the world's largest IT fair opened its doors in Hannover, Germany. CeBIT is by far the most important IT related fair in Europe and also has a big international impact, which is underlined by the fact that this year’s CeBIT was visited by people from more than 100 different countries. Like last year, the Joomla! project, represented by a team of well known volunteers from the local community, was part of the CMS Garden booth in Hall 6 at the event.
CMS-Garden?
The CMS-Garden is a cooperation of 12 Open Source CMS communities (Joomla!, WordPress, Drupal, Typo3, Contao, Contendio, Redaxo, Scientifc, Django, OpenCMS, Plone and Papaya) which was first launched last year, with the objective to promote all attending Open Source CMS's as powerful and professional products, that can be used to achieve a wide range of web-based projects.
Even more important: The CMS-Garden aims to improve the visibility of Open Source CMS's in general and spread the word that Open Source is the better alternative to traditional closed-source systems.
You may ask yourself "why does Joomla present itself together with other systems? Why not have its own booth and do our own thing?"
The answer is simple: At these events, you need to be big to get attention!
A single project with a small booth isn't interesting or special, and therefore you would neither attract a significant number of visitors nor significant media attention. By joining together with other Content Management Systems in the CMS-Garden, we represent the systems that power 170,000,000 websites! A quarter of the entire web - that's big business! - and you know what? The concept works even better than we ever hoped!
Some examples from our "list of success" for this year's CeBIT:
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A huge 120sqm booth
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More than 8,000 visitors at the booth
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5,000 brochures given away to the visitors
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Visibility in the Twitter timeline of more than 300,000 people
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Mentioned by CeBIT as one of the event highlights
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Mentions in two professional IT magazines in Germany
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A new cooperation with the "Open Source Business Alliance"
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A new cooperation with an Open Source organisation based in Finland
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Countless people who were amazed by the the fact that Open Source projects attend a business-centric fair - and do an awesome job!
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66 volunteer CMS "ambassadors" during the CeBIT week
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Tons of happy faces
For me, as an ambassador, it was an absolutely amazing event! I talked to people who, in the very moment they understood the concept behind the Garden and Open Source in general, literally became speechless, because they never came across the concept in their normal, closed-source-focused life.
What's most important for me: it's a wonderful, very powerful and motivating feeling to have a beer and meal with folks from 8 CMS's, share your thoughts, discuss different approaches to problems all communities have and finally realise that we all are one big Open Source family!
And to make it even better: it's not over! CMS-Garden will be attending several more events this year, i.e. the LinuxDays in Berlin or the WorldHostingDays in Rust, Germany, who invited CMS-Garden to their event to improve the communication between CMS' and webhosts. So, I think there's some pretty exciting stuff ahead.
Finally, I would like to say "thank you" to the Joomla booth-team, who did an incredible job, answered countless questions and helped to spread the Joomla and FOSS word to the CeBIT visitors: Markus Wortmann, Andre Dreier, Viktor Vogel, Alexander Metzler, Niels Nübel, Thomas Kahl and Stefan Wendhausen!
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