Unfortunately, I am not able to attend 2011 CMS Expo, USA (May 2-4) which seems to be a highly anticipated event in the fast-growth CMS Sector, and usually I write articles after attending a conference and not in advance, but in the Joomla!sphere, everything is a bit different these days. I assume many people will come directly from the CMS Expo to Europe for a truly unique event:

Joomla! and the knights of open source proudly present ‘J and Beyond 2011 | An International Joomla! Event - May 6th-8th, 2011, Kerkrade, Netherlands’. This event will start on Friday the 6 May 2011 at 10 AM CEST and it ends Sunday 8 May 2011 at 5 PM CEST. In between, you will experience an unmeasurable amount of awesomenimity something can produce.

There is a lot of understatement involved when announcing ‘an’ international Joomla! event.

I think this is ‘the’ international Joomla! event in 2011, and for me it seems to be a very, very community driven event (which is not that often in today's world of open source software). I am one of the ‘usual community members’ and I am very curious and excited for the event organized by Fotis Evangelou, Chiara, Alex Kempkens, Brian Teeman, Jeremy Wilken, Robert Deutz and many more people.

I am a little part of Jeremy Wilkens’ video team, who will record the whole conference and will bring it as fast as possible to your screen in an unbelievable quality! Jeremy asked his team which session we would like to attend so we could combine watching and recording a session which was a wonderful idea. E.g. I will attend and record these sessions:

• Friday - 14:30-15:30 Aula Major - What is Molajo - Amy Stephen
  (I like the idea of Molajo and I am so happy to meet Amy!)
• Saturday - 14:15-15:15 Room4 - Getting Involved in the Joomla Community: Where, How & Why - Chad Windnagle
  (That is one of most important tasks of everyone. Help others how to get involved!)
• Saturday - 15:45-16:45 Room2 - Future of JandBeyond - Robert Deutz
  (I am simply curious. Robert started such an amazing event and I would ask you (yes, YOU) to suggest where the next jandbeyond should take place [please_comment_on_that]
• Sunday - 11:30-12:30 Aula Minor - Beez Features HTML5 and Wai Aria - Angie Radtke
  (Angies’ topic is accessible templates. She is the force behind the Beez template. She is very tough, lives in a dark, German forest (most German forest are dark...), and she is so important to the Joomla! world. I am honored to record this session)
• Sunday - 15:30-16:30 Aula Minor - Better content management with K2 - the present and future - Fotis Evangelou
  (He is the ‘evil’ guy who initially refused to upgrade k2 to Joomla! 1.6 :) <- I like that discussion but will intentionally not link to his post. Now, he has changed his mind and I am very curious to see the ‘better content management’ session, especially the part concerning the future!)

These are only five from more than 60 sessions, plus an interesting keynote by Tony Guntharp - The Mobile Cloud Opportunity. Isidro, James, Sudhi, Simon, Chad, Ghio, Parth, Toni, Ashwin, Martijn will record the other sessions :)

Beside these sessions, the event also has:

• the JOOMBALL RALLY with Joomla! fans travelling from across Europe to Kerkrade in the Netherlands. I will start with a blue Smart and a few bottles of wine from Fitou. Please comment where and when are you starting?
• the amazing Shuttle Bus Service from the railway stations of either Kerkrade Centrum (Netherlands) or Herzogenrath (Germany)
• the pre-event ski party. Thanks to the Nooku team this year, J and Beyond starts a little early with a pre-event party on the evening of Thursday 5th May (hope to see you there).
• the JoomStew Radio team featuring Dianne Henning and Alice Grevet doing live interviews.
• the Joomla! Open Source Creative and Artistic Recognition Awards, or in short J.O.S.C.A.R.s. “The voting will take place all the attendees with the winners announce in a star studded celebrity awards ceremony on Saturday 7th May”.
• the 223 attendees which are mostly well known Joomla! celebrities or sometimes only liked for their body (which is acceptable :) )
• the Lightning Talks, which are an opportunity for anyone to make a short presentation on anything.
• the JUG meet together offers an opportunity to the Joomla! User Groups (JUG) in the world to meet each other.

The J and Beyond Exhibition with:

• JEvents - Joomla Event management
• Beyounic
• Form2Content CCK – by Open Source Design
• ATAAW, Molajo, and jZenGarden
• Matias Aguirre with JUpdater
• NoNumber!, Peter van Westen
• Stephen Brandon with MetaMod & MetaTemplate
• joomDiet
• fabrikar.com by pollen-8.co.uk

And, last but not least, the heart of every event, our very important sponsors:

• Main sponsor redComponent.dk
• Social sponsor eBay Inc
• Gold sponsor JoomlArt
• Gold Sponsor Community Builder
• Gold Sponsor Microsoft
• Gold Sponsor MailChimp
• Silver sponsor JoomFish the multilingual solution for Joomla!
• Silver sponsor Nooku
• Silver sponsor SobiPro by Sigsiu.NET
• Silver sponsor K2 (by JoomlaWorks)
• Silver sponsor Anything Digital
• Silver sponsor appcelerator
• Bronze sponsor freakedout.de
• Bronze sponsor Yireo e-commerce solutions for Joomla
• Bronze sponsor SEBLOD is back to J and Beyond as sponsor! (clever headline :) )
• Bronze sponsor Franzis Verlag GmbH

I (and I am sure many more people) just want to say, ‘Thank you - it’s so great that you are sponsoring this event!’

If you want to follow the event online, your friend will be the hashtag #jab11 (on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and [insert_your_favorite_social_media_service]).

Hope to see you all in Kerkrade and btw ... there are three nights of [insert_your_favorite_vice] in the Netherlands!