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[jtodd at digium.com]

I'd like to take a few moments to introduce myself and the new role
in which I'll be working for Digium to further the Asterisk project
and environment. As you may know, Digium plays a key part in
assisting with the development of the Asterisk project, and so I am
pleased to be working for them in a full-time capacity as "Asterisk
Open Source Community Director", replacing the talented Jared Smith
who has moved over to do customer training and bootcamps in order to
bring more people into the quickly-growing Asterisk environment. My
job as Community Director is to know the members of the development
community outside of the Digium staff, to understand the issues and
work towards harmonizing (or at least listen to) the various opinions
on code issues and roadmap concepts, and to function as an interface
between Digium and the large group of coders who appreciate and
contribute to Asterisk. The work that Digium does on Asterisk is of
great value to the community (and almost inversely, Asterisk is of
great value to Digium) but Digium is only a portion of the equation -
we (Digium) need to work to continue to integrate the code
contributed by the community, the concepts brought to us by users,
and to resolve the problems that may arise with the rapidly changing
areas of complexity in which Asterisk is now proving to be essential
to the telephony applications market. There is much still to be
done! Digium can only provide a portion of the effort - it's up to
the rest of the community to create the rest of Asterisk.

I'll also be taking on a number of other tasks which are less obvious
to the community, such as assisting with the content of Astricon, the
premier Asterisk event (September 23-25 - plug, plug -
www.astricon.net) - if you have ideas on content or talks, please let
me know. We've collected a set of potential speakers - if you've
already talked to Julie Webb, you're on the list. If you've got an
interesting talk for the business or technical aspects of Asterisk,
let us know! We'd love to hear you speak in Phoenix.

I will also be trying to monitor the mailing lists, IRC channels, and
various blogs about Asterisk - but I also suspect I will not be able
to keep up with the huge volume of information that is generated
every day. If you have specific concerns or discussions, please feel
free to reach out to me directly - my email is jtodd at digium.com, and
I will read all messages and I hope that I will be able to reply to
each as well, even if I don't have an immediate solution or knowledge
of your request. While I am happy to function as a sounding board
for complaints, I will also tend to focus a higher level of effort on
those issues which represent some way of increasing the ability of
the community to help itself, versus requests that simply ask for
something to be created/fixed/modified. Asterisk is open source, and
is developed by a community - if you're reading this, you're a member
of the community, and my job is to try to make your efforts more
effective.

A bit of background on me: I've been working with Asterisk since 2003
(arguably 2002) and I've worked with dozens of companies either as a
consultant or in a few cases as a full-time Asterisk wrangler. My
work has mostly been in the service provider areas, and I'm quickly
coming to learn more about the "solutions" space, and your insights
on this will be interesting learning as I move forward. I've spoken
dozens of times on Asterisk or Asterisk-related topics, I've been to
all the Astricons, and I've written quite a few articles on Asterisk
- but all of that experience is actually quite small in the face of
the huge number of possible permutations of what people in the
community have done, and I am constantly surprised by how Asterisk is
being used.

Part of what makes Asterisk such a great platform is not only the
depth and capabilities of the code, but the enthusiasm, knowledge,
and constant work by the community of people around the world who use
Asterisk for themselves and for their business. When Mark Spencer
started Asterisk, he didn't start another PBX company - he started a
telephony revolution. Development on Asterisk became a vision of a
toolkit that was to be extended by thousands of individuals, all
working on the same project to complete their own goals. It would be
used by application developers, service providers, systems
integrators, hardware hackers, entrepreneurs, and enterprises - all
of which would have the ability to develop and contribute their code
back to each other with Digium as the hub of activity. I hope that I
can continue the work that has already started to keep Digium as a
sponsor and advocate of the Asterisk platform, and I'm looking
forward to my tenure in this position.

JT

--
--
John Todd jtodd at digium.com
Asterisk Open Source Community Director

[spamsucks2005 at gmail...]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 7:41 PM, John Todd <jtodd at digium.com> wrote:

[jtodd at digium.com]

[oej at edvina.net]

John,

Welcome to the new position!

From all the discussions we've had in the advisory council and before
that, I know that you have been in that position for a long time, the
difference is that Digium started paying you now...

Looking forward to the future of the Asterisk project

/Olle

[jra at baylink.com]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 11:12:17AM -0700, John Todd wrote:

[zoachien at securax.org]

congratz!

Zoa

John Todd wrote:

[sherwood.mcgowan at gm...]

Welcome!

[asternic at gmail.com]

Hi John, congratulations!... and to Digium for hiriing such talented people.

[spamsucks2005 at gmail...]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 3:12 PM, Nicol?s Gudi?o <asternic at gmail.com> wrote: