A Joomla delegation attended CloudFest 2018, the world's largest cloud festival (over 6500 attendees, 200 exhibitors, and 250 speakers) to raise awareness about the Project.
The event occured at Europa Park (Rust - Germany) from March 10th to 16th, 2018 and I was there to promote Joomla.

In November 2017, while attending the Joomla World Conference in Rome, Italy, Soren was looking for someone who is willing and able to make Joomla’s Partners happy. We discussed the topic at length and after the conference I became a member of the Partnership Success Working Group. The basic idea of the team is to make partners happy. As a volunteer project, Joomla needs money, so we offer something in the sense of

Hey, Joomla can maximize your ROI. We have lots of options ... Let’s talk :)

Joomla already has some Partners & Sponsors but we are looking for more.

Now I come into the game. As I am German, I represented Joomla at CloudFest. Remember, my role is to make partners happy. My first task was to find partners for Joomla at this very unique conference in an amusement park in Germany.
The conference itself has a long history as an event for "the hosting industry" which basically consists of everything that is related to data centres, storage, servers, operating systems, cables and all the software needed to run it in a proper way. With the invention of "cloud computing" companies like Amazon Web Services,  Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud got a huge piece of the "hosting business cake". I assume the growing cloud business was also the reason to change the name of the conference from World Hosting Days to CloudFest.

How was the conference?

Simply amazing. It was perfectly organised, everything worked well, each evening was a cool event, lot of food, even more to drink, people were happy!

About Joomla

We had a nice booth ...

We, that means Soren Beck Jensen (Legal & Finance DC), Holger Kremers, Jason Nickerson (Capital Team Member), Michael Klein and Ufuk Avzu (Marketing Team Lead). David Jardin, as "The German Joomler" was at the CMS Garden booth.

I arrived on the second day of the conference. The plan was that Jason and Soren were talking the whole day with potential partners. Holger, Michael, Ufuk and I spoke to visitors at the booth, telling them about the wonderful Joomlaverse and tried to convince them that it would be a wonderful idea to become a Joomla partner.

Plenty of attendees visited our booth, asked about Joomla and liked the idea of becoming a partner. The name Joomla seems to still be very strong. Everybody knew the name and it was easy to talk to people.

The conference was successful for the Joomla Project. Joomla should soon have new partners to help us do more and better, which would be an extraordinary success to me. My job as a "Partner Success" volunteer will start when the contracts are signed, so for me it was interesting to see the Joomla team live and in action.

What is this Tattoo thing?

Christopher Nielsen and his wife Sony Fernandez got a CloudFest Tattoo during the Joomla World Conference in Rome. The basic idea was improving awareness about Joomla and CloudFest. They were invited to the conference as VIP guests with a special program.

Here is a photo of Christopher and Sony together with Soeren vonVarchmin, the CEO of the event.

CMS Garden

... is a wonderful idea bringing open source Content Management Systems together.  http://www.cms-garden.org/

And was it also fun?

A big Yes! Beside people, events and the posh VIP service (remember, I was the lucky winner of a VIP Package) I enjoyed two attractions in Europapark. The Rollercoaster BlueFire and the Voletarium. I talked to many people and taught them a lot about Joomla.

Next steps

Even if I cannot attend J and Beyond 2018 in Germany, I want to do something for the project. I like Joomla because it is quite unique. There is no company behind the Joomla Project. Behind WordPress is Automattic and behind Drupal, Acquia. Joomla is such an interesting mixture of so many different people, cultures, characters and all kind of companies, from small to famous brands and ... it's not only ‘still alive’, it gets more attention.