Earlier this year we participated in FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, Belgium. Overall the event was a major success and we're very happy we were able to take part in it!

For FOSDEM 2013, we'll be back in Brussels and participating in a major way. The first day of FOSDEM (February 2, 2013) will be the 2nd birthday for the Jenkins project, and seems appropriate that project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi will be giving a keynote session titled: "How we made the Jenkins community"

Here's an excerpt from Kohsuke's talk proposal:

Jenkins project has an interesting history. It started from scratch on my spare time, and grow over time to boast 600+ open-source plugins developed by 300+ contributors from all around the world.

There are several key ingredients, both technical and social, that enabled this model, and I think those ingredients are useful to other projects. In this talk, I'll discuss how Jenkins project and the community works, what these ingredients are, why they help you attract more developers into your projects, and why it matters.

You can read more about Kohsuke's keynote here

In addition to the keynote, I (R. Tyler Croy), and a number of members of the Jenkins, Cucumber and Selenium communities are hosting the first ever Testing and Automation devroom at FOSDEM.

If you're interested in submitting a talk proposal for the dev room the deadline is 23:59 UTC on December 21st 2012! The Call for Proposals can be found here, and the proposal submission form can can be found here.

We are very likely going to have a table in the hall again this year, but the FOSDEM committee hasn't yet confirmed whether or not we will have a table.

Regardless, a lot of Jenkins community members will be at FOSDEM in February in addition to hundreds of other open source contributors and users from around the world.

If you're interested in participating and/or meeting up with the Jenkins crowd, there's details coming together on the FOSDEM wiki page.

We hope to see you there!

Just like the last year, we are running a survey this year, to get some objective insights into what our users would like to see in the project. Obviously, the developers in the project deal with individual bug reports and feature requests all the time, but sometimes those day-to-day issues distract you from a bigger picture.

This year, we kept some of the questions the same, so that we can see the trend. But we also discussed what we wanted to ask among ourselves and revised some more.

The tricky thing about being an open-source project is that it's not like some of us can actually decide what we'll be working on — in the end it's up to individual contributors to decide what they want to work on. So I can't make promises, but in a way, that's precisely why we'd like to get these objective, measurable, quantitative feedbacks. It lets us discuss how to solve the problem, instead of spending time discussing what the problem is.

Because I work on Jenkins day in day out, it's easy for me to forget that most people don't pay /that/ much attention to Jenkins. If you fit that category, and if you want to stay on top of the latest happenings in Jenkins, don’t miss Volume 2 of Continuous Information, the CloudBees Newsletter for Jenkins.

This issue...

• Features details about the 6 upcoming Jenkins User Conferences (don’t miss these)
• Announces the new Jenkins CIA Program (join us to promote Jenkins around the globe)
• Shows you where to find in-depth information about the latest Jenkins UI improvements and featured plugins (cool stuff)
• Highlights the importance of Jenkins Security Advisories (install these regularly)
• Tells you why Jenkins has blue balls instead of green ones (seriously)
• Shows you the latest Jenkins Usage Stats (still growing super-fast)
• … and more great stuff, including a bit of Jenkins humor (courtesy of our friends at Geek and Poke)

(Editor's note: Apologies for the delay in getting this wrap-up out, it's been quite a busy month!)

This year has already been full of milestones, the first of which being our first birthday as an open source project. The second major milestone for the project was that we went to FOSDEM 2012, arguably the largest volunteer-organized and operated open source conference on the planet.

We had a couple of things going on at FOSDEM that merit a mention:

• The Jenkins project had a stand in the K building, the same building where the Free Java, Config and Systems Management, and a few other pertinent dev rooms were located
• The Jenkins project gave away 2 free copies of John Smart's book: "Jenkins: The Definitive Guide" (thanks to O'Reilly!)
• Community member R. Tyler Croy gave a talk on running the Jenkins project infrastructure with Puppet
• The O'Reilly folks brought 10+ Jenkins books to sell at their stand.
• Project founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi and a number of project members held a constructive UI Enhancements discussion.

We were very fortunate to have so many Jenkins contributors in attendance, who all helped with the Jenkins stand, introducing people to Jenkins and much more.

FOSDEM in their own words

Our earlier appeal for donation was a drastic boost to our fund-raising drive, (and looking at the twitter reactions, it feels like the Wikipedia parody we put on Jenkins on Jenkins helped spread the words — I guess jokes do work!

And I'm happy to report that we've successfully raised over $12000 as of today. That's more than enough to pay off all the current balance and it should keep the project going for quite a while. I've assembled the donor list in appreciation.

So once again, thanks everyone for their generous support!