Wim 2
Originally uploaded by stevenn.

Blood, sweat, nerves. But definitely fun. Here's Wim, a friend of ours, who wanted some pictures for promoting his new dance act.

Right now, I'm sitting in the office pondering how long my lack-of-sleep-induced haziness will still last, while the Orixo peeps are all driving home. So we're looking at a stretch from Sunday evening until Wednesday afternoon which has been filled with Cocooneries, Belgian beers, old and new acquaintances and even some business contacts. As you might guess, I'm pretty tired by now. ;-)

It's been immensely fun though, seeing all those folks travel to little Belgium, quite a few of them for the third year in a row, to indulge themselves into Cocoon geekery and GetTogether traditions such as Westmalle Dubbel. Let's try to do a brief recount.

On Sunday, we met with about 30 in the Vooruit, a Grand Café which played some weird music while we were there. We finally got to shake hands with Antonio, our Nicaraguan Cocoonie which used the occasion of being in Europe to make a swift roundtrip Zurich-Ghent. Lots of other familiar faces were there as well, with the Aussie contingent (which had grown with a German member since last year) as the icing on the cake. Suffice to say that I wasn't very happy with getting up in the morning after way too little hours of sleep.

Monday was Hackathon day, with 70 folks and assorted laptops (except for the Hippo folks who wanted to brag with their fancy Dell screens), a shortage of power cords during the first hour, and a nice and cosy feel about the Cocoon community: it felt really nice going in the room during the late afternoon and see so many people chatting with each other. Stefano made a bed-side appearance through iChat A/V as well, and we made some decisions about stabilizing CForms, the component framework for Cocoon 3 and how to tackle the ever-outstanding documentation issues. In the evening, we headed towards the "ribs place" for the annual sparerib fest, with no less than 84 folks sharing (quite a few) tables. Again, too much food and drinks, and too few sleeping hours, but tuning in the GT vibe helped to counter that.

Tuesday was the conference day, which went really well with loads of interesting presentations (they should get uploaded soonish), videotaping, iChat-on-the-big-screen with Stefano, an amazingly fast-paced but well managed business success stories session with Gianugo, and various other events which put smiles on my face (except for the sudden sound burps the A/V installation kept surprising me with). I shot many mugshots of all the speakers and I hope to be processing these soon. Afterwards, there was the Belgian beer reception and then we headed for another dinner. While the menu didn't seem to be the best choice to cater for all the tastes of such a large group (76 folks), it seemed as if people were able not to dwell too long on the salmon thing and still enjoy their evening. An evening which, for me and quite a few others, ended in an Irish pub and more of the same.

Today, there was an Orixo meeting which amongst other things also handled the GT aftermath, and there's quite a few changes which are bubbling up in my mind as a result of that. Firstly, we will be trying to host some half-day Cocoon tutorial session during the Hackathon next year, and try to stimulate folks to start discussing common issues and subjects sooner during the day. Also, the GT will move back to its roots as the Cocoon community event, which will mean I'll cater for more, and visible involvement of the Cocoon community at-large in order to search and select talk topics and speakers, and hopefully also find some co-organizers for various other organisational tasks as well. And lastly, there's a good chance we'll expand the number of days up to three, making it possible to also fit a business presentations day in the overall GT event - something which will be organized and hosted by Orixo. All good stuff IMHO.

Many people helped out to make this year's edition into a success again - more specifically the speakers, the badge and videotape providers, and of course the sponsors. Thanks to all of you! But on a personal note, there's also four folks who have to live with me during the organizational setup period - whether they want this or not. Marc and Bruno, thanks for doing paid work while I get the fun of being the GT organizational puppet. And Mieke and Els, thanks for letting Marc and I do what we like to do, even if that means we disappear from the family front for a three-day period, and that you have to come and help us manning the registration desk in order to catch a glimp of us. It's over now, at least for this year! :-)

Picture gallery (evening meetup and Hackathon)

After a 10 month roadtrip, Daisy, our open source content management application framework, passes an important milestone: its first public release. Daisy is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and can be installed without expensive consultancy fees in less than an hour, time for a good read of the extensive documentation included. We'll be presenting Daisy to the Cocoon community during the Cocoon GetTogether, so this is a message for those who can't be with us in Ghent next Monday and Tuesday. While others are chatting and boozing, you could be the first to get Daisy up and running: tell us what you think of it! As usual with such events, this is a time for saying thank you. Wim and Johan, commissioners and funders, thanks (again) for the trust in us. Bruno, architect and builder, thanks (again) that we could trust this baby in your hands. It's a beauty and you should be proud of it. With open source development, a first release doesn't mean something coming to an end. It's a passing stage towards a future, and I'd love to see what this future will bring for Daisy and us. Enjoy!

But this little event keeps me a tiny bit busy. 100+ attendees so far - yippee! Oh, I ripped the idea of the live, public attendee counter from Chris Sell who used to be doing a similar thing way back - something I spotted through Sam Ruby somewhere in 2002 I guess. The icky thing is that, typically, registrations go slow first, and then accelerate since people start seeing that others will be coming too. Hence the flurry of new registrations over the past week. Next year, I'll start doing things a few weeks earlier - I really would like to see us going way beyond 100 some time.