Welcome from your new Community Manager

by Lars Kurth
A week ago, I started as Community Manager for Xen.org. I spent last week getting up-to-speed on the basics and feel that now it is time for a quick introduction.
I have worked as part of and with various open source communities for 9 years now. I won’t bore you with the details: if you want to find out more, check out my Wiki profile. I am very excited to work with you all and be part of the Xen community, which has been leading the open source cloud computing revolution for a while. I am convinced that it will stay exciting and grow and I hope I can make a big contribution.
For me personally, moving from mobile and semiconductors into virtualisation and cloud computing, will create a bit of a learning curve. So please bear with me when I cannot help immediately in all matters. Please feel free to contact me at any time with any question or ideas, or for all things Xen. I will follow up and make things happen. My e-mail address is lars.kurth@xen.org and I am usually on skype on lars.kurth during UK office hours.
At this point, I wanted to share what I will be working on over the coming weeks:

• Work out the event plan for 2011: of particular importance is the next Xen Asia and the Xen Global Summit in the USA.
• Rejuvenate the Xen.org web-site, both in terms of content as well as infrastructure. This is a project that Stephen has started and which I feel is really important. You will see a number of smaller changes over the coming weeks and bigger changes after that.
• The Xen.org community is very vibrant, but operates to a set of unwritten rules that have evolved over time. I will need to learn these rules anyway: thus, I will work with you and write down how XEN.org governance works.
• Communication, communication, communication!

I strongly believe in openness, collaboration and listening and will thus put mechanisms in place which allow you to let me know what worked well in the past and also what did not work so well. This will create an opportunity to make changes for the better. And: I will always make my plans and ideas available for review and commenting, such that you have a voice.
I am excited to work with you all and hopefully meet many of you in the near future.
Best Regards
Lars