In 2001, on December 14th, two guys founded an open-source resource, dedicated entirely to that very special niche product called Lotus Notes and Domino. The guys were Nathan T. Freeman and Bruce Elgort. Nathan got the idea some days before, posted this in a forum and immediately got feedback. Some days later Bruce set up a server in his office and the project got started.
Today we are celebrating the 20th birthday of this crazy idea. Crazy ideas sometimes are the spark to something greater.
Today, December 14 in 2021, we celebrate this ignition - with you. Come and join the herd here in our open-mic session at 5 p.m. CET (https://www.openntf.org/main.nsf/blog.xsp?permaLink=GACS-C8SMKW).
When I joined the Yellow Bubble in 2000, OpenNTF wasn't there, so I learned it from the beginning. Notes.net was the forum where I got the link from.
It started slowly but soon there were people who used the "Main Bar", the snippets-forum to exchange code and ideas.
As I was starting to learn the eco-sytem (with Notes/Domino 4.5) I didn't utilize that much from it. When R5 arrived, things got more busy and the first projects came in handy to my daily work.
When XPages were introduced, I got more confidence in what I was doing and so I decided to publish my first project to OpenNTF. This was in 2013. At this time OpenNTF proclaimed a contest in which I was one of the finalists. Thanks Niklas Heidloff I also got the chance to introduce it in a webcast. A few weeks later I had the chance to join the curators of the newly introduced platform called "Collaboration Today" (CT).
Somehow I took over the curation of the source code, too, and it happened, that I released different versions of CT over the next years. I also acquired other volunteers to moderate blog posts and keep this website alive. Thank you to all who participated during the past years!
Today we are just coming together to celebrate a great idea of a few, the work of so many contributors over the years and the joy of enthusiasts who are still around.