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CMS-Garden 2014 - It's growing!

CMS-Garden 2014 - It's growing!

Today the first "Christmas Market" in my hometown opened its doors – and each and every year that's the time when I realize, that another year is almost over. 2014 was a very successful year for Joomla – and I want to show you what the CMS-Garden has contributed to this success.

CMS-What?

In case you never heard about CMS-Garden before reading these lines: 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.

If you want to learn more about the history of the project, feel free to check out my last year's article!

January - March: Fundraising and preparing for CeBIT

The first three months of 2014 were mostly dominated by our fundraising campaign. Each and every year it's a hard fight to find enough donors and sponsors for all our events – and with a budget of roughly 75000€, we needed quite a few of them. Luckily, our successes in 2013 impressed not only companies and other sponsors, but also the official projects and associations of CMS that are represented in the Garden, and so the Garden got funds by OpenSourceMatters, the associations of Drupal, Typo3, Contao and Plone.

After the fundraising campaign was over, we started our preparations for CeBIT 2014, the world's largest IT fair, which was a hell lot of work but also, once again, a great success and a lot of fun. I wrote an article about this year's CeBIT, so feel free to read it for a more detailed report.

April: Meeting the hosting industry at WHD.global

In early 2014, I contacted the organizers of the world's largest webhosting conference WorldHostingDays.global and after having a coffee and telling them about our Garden, they invited us to attend their conference and have a booth in the exhibition area. We talked to hundreds of people from the hosting industry who were positively surprised to see us at "their" conference and were very thankful for the possibility to provide feedback in a face-to-face environment. During the three-day event I realized how important it is to engage closer with the hosting industry! Webhosts are among our most important partners and making their lives easier (by providing better documentation and special tools) will make the lives of our users easier too!

May-November: Events, Events, Events

After WHD.global, CMS-Garden was invited to a couple of more events, and so the following months brought us to events all over Germany:

  • LinuxDays, Berlin
  • DMS-Expo, Stuttgart
  • WHD.local, Munich
  • FrosCON, Bonn
  • WordCamp, Hamburg
  • JoomlaDay Germany, Cologne
  • IT-Anwenderforum, Chemnitz
  • InternetWorld, Munich
  • InternetSecurityDays, Cologne
  • LinuxDays, Chemnitz
  • OpenRheinRuhr, Oberhausen

During these events, we talked to thousands of people, distributed our brochure "CMS Gardener's Guide" and spread the word of Open Source. Roughly 100 gardners from all over Germany contributed countless hours to make this possible!

Bringing it to the next level: the "eco" association

In order to make even more good contacts to companies, govermental organizations and industry associations, the CMS-Garden applied for a membership in the eco, the association of the German internet industry – and our application was approved! The membership allowed us to attend at "InternetSecurityDays" and the "eco kongress", the yearly meeting of the internet industry. Attending these events allows us to have an influence on much higher levels than before – and without CMS-Garden, this would never have happend!

Conclusion: it works!

After two years, the CMS-Garden allowed us to attend countless events and spread the word of Open Source to tens of thousands of people. By combining our forces with other CMSs, each system only has to invest a very limited amount of funds and time, especially in comparsion to the great benefit that is generated. As an initiative, that represents a major part of "the internet", we're also a very interesting partner for large companies and govermental organizations. The cooperation with the other FOSS CMSs opens doors and brings us in touch with people, that a single system would never have reached.

Making plans for 2015

Right now we're starting our fund raising campaign for 2015, so if you read these lines and you're interested in sponsoring the Garden, please let me know! ;)

If fundraising works as planned, CMS-Garden will attend at least the same amount of conferences and fairs as in 2014, but if you ask me, chances are good that we will have a few more this year. ;)

And finally, there's another highlight for 2015 on the horizon: Robert Deutz, co-organizer of the famous J&Beyond conference and myself have started to organize the very first annual CMS-Garden conference! The conference's goal is to bring passionate people from different FOSS CMSs together to give them the opportunity to get to know each other, share knowledge, make common plans and – of course – have a few beers! The date is not set yet, but we hope to announce it in a few weeks, so follow the CMS-Garden's twitter stream to make sure you don't miss that!

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