On December 15, 2010, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Board agreed to the resolution declaring that theApache Enterprise Social Messaging Environment (ESME) was ready to become an Apache Top Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.
This declaration represents the high point of the evolution of an idea that started in a plurk conversation over 2.5 years ago. For the 1.5 years, ESME has been part of the Apache Incubator – gaining experience in collaboration based on the Apache Philosophyand building a community.
While I’ve often ESME accepted into prestigious Apache Incubator, I wanted to describe why this recent change is relevant for the SAP ecosystem and SCN in particular:
- Involvement in the Open Source Community: There was a Open Source at SAP in 2010 describing the Open Source Software (OSS) efforts of SAP in the past year. ESME represents the OSS involvement of the SAP ecosystem / community rather than SAP. The resulting awareness of related issues such as licensing or collaboration in the Apache style is useful in other SCN initiatives such as CodeX. As a new Apache Software Foundation officer (VP, Project ESME), I also intend to bring the experience and knowledge gained in this environment back into the SAP ecosystem.
- SAP Mentors: If you look at the list of initial members of the new TLP, you will see that many are SAP Mentors. ESME is an excellent example (as are other efforts such as the SAP Certification Survey , etc) of SAP Mentors working on a project that has relevance for the SAP ecosystem and beyond. Of importance is the fact that ESME also has a presence / footprint outside of SCN.
- Long-Running Community Project: There are a variety of “community projects” that have emerged in the SAP ecosystem. Often, such projects have a relatively short lifespan of a few months. ESME can be seen as long-running community project that originated in the SAP community but which has expanded beyond it to include other communities (Lift, Scala, etc). This project has been existence for over 2.5 years and has never stopped evolving.
- Involved Technology: When ESME started, Twitter was largely unknown and microblogging and activity streams in enterprise settings were non-existent. Today, such collaborative metaphors are present in many platforms (for example, Chatter in SalesForce or ActivtyStreams in StreamWork). As ESME evolves into new areas of collaborative technology (stream filtering, etc), interactions with the SAP ecosystem will hopefully continue and deepen.
There is a famous advertisement from the 70’s that describes the ability of women to smoke which was called “You’ve come a long way baby”. I definitely don’t condone smoking but I liked the idea of evolution and I thought it mapped well to the development that ESME has experienced.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank all those who have been involved in ESME over this time period. The list of active participants has changed over the years but I’d like to consider all those who participated in one way or another as part of the extended ESME family. We couldn’t have made it this far without you.
