Looking for the most active and successful Joomla community in the world? There's a good chance you'll find it in the Netherlands.
The community in the Netherlands and Belguim runs multiple Joomla User Groups and this weekend will hold its sixth Joomla Day. Hundreds of open source experts, business users, developers, and community users will be meeting in Doorn.
To celebrate the occasion we interviewed Sander Potjer who's helping to organize this years event:
1) Tell us a little about yourself and your background
I am a 25 year old student Architecture and owner of a small webdevelopment company specialized in Joomla. I live in the surroundings of Amsterdam in The Netherlands. For several years I participate in the (mostly Dutch) Joomla community, currently as chairman of "Stichting Sympathy", a foundation that supports the Joomla project in The Netherlands by facilitating the Dutch community www.joomlacommunity.eu, the Dutch Joomla User Groups and the yearly Dutch Joomla Days.
2) How did you get involved in Joomla?
The first website that I’ve build was for my rowing team was with Mambo, shortly after that Mambo was forked so I changed the website to Joomla. After two years building more websites and "Joomla learning" I started to help other people by answering questions on the Dutch forums by sharing my Joomla knowledge.
I really enjoyed to participate in the community so shortly after that I become more and more active in the Dutch community. Together with other people we founded JoomlaCommunity.eu and I also started to help out with the organization of the Dutch JoomlaDays. Past year we launched the Dutch Joomla User Groups with at the moment 10 active groups.
On January 11, 2011 we founded the foundation “Stichting Sympathy” (yes, on the same date of the Joomla 1.6 release). With the foundation we have taken over the organization of the Dutch JoomlaDays, because Henk van Cann announced to stop organizing it after 5 editions, but the members of the organization team are still the same enthusiastic people!
3) Tell us about the event that you're holding
On Saturday April 2nd & Sunday April 3rd we're organizing the 6th Dutch Joomla Days in The Netherlands. Over 200 people will attend both days to attend several of the in total 50 different talks, by 35 national and international speakers. We will have a wide variety of talks in 5 different tracks; Joomla, General, Extensions, Demonstrations and Cases.
This edition will go further than just JoomlaDays, over 60 people will overnight at the venue and join for the dinner and drinks in the evening. On Sunday morning people can attend the Joomla Performance Run, which is a 30 minute run through the fields and woods of the beautiful surrounding of Doorn. Not just JoomlaDays, it’s an entire JoomlaWeekend!
4) Who should come to the event?
All people interested or working with Joomla should attend. We will have talks for beginners (How to install Joomla), experts (The Power of Unix Scripts) and many in between. For people looking for ideas and suggestions for Joomla implementations we have a special Case track with talks from small and enterprise companies using Joomla for their websites or building applications on top of it.
5) What are the precise details we should know?
- Date: April 2-3, 2011
- Location: Conference Center Kaap Doorn in Doorn, The Netherlands
- Schedule: Saturday and Sunday
- Price: Early bird prices for 1 day tickets: €75, 2 days: €95. Including coffee, lunch & soft drinks. But we’re sorry, we already sold out two weeks ago...
- Website: www.joomladagen.nl
- Livestream: live.joomladagen.nl
- Hashtag: #jd11nl
I would like to take the opportunity to thank Anja Hage, Frank Timmers, Hans Kuijpers, Harold Veldoen, Jan Willem Reimelink, Maarten Vrijken, Martijn Boomsma and Meta Kruijs for their great job in organizing the JoomlaDays! Well done, it’s great to work with such an experienced team, enjoy this weekend!
Many thanks also to our main sponsors: Byte Internet, Microsoft, Nooku, Jira ICT, 2Value, Rochen and XLS Hosting.
