August 3rd, 2008
JasperSoft outsourced its community forge
You’d never know this from a casual visit but JasperSoft has outsourced its community forge site.
Which is the point, you don’t need to know. It’s still Jaspersoft.org. It’s just running on the software, the servers, and with the help of EssentiaESP, which launched at OSCON.
The only evidence of a vendor is down at the bottom of the page, a small Essentia bug and an “About Essentia” link. The branding, the trade dress and the content all come from JasperSoft.
Essentia CEO Gopi Ganapathy said the trend away from Sourceforge and toward homegrown forge sites made sense until communities like JasperSoft’s grew to 50,000 dedicated users and more. Now they need help.
“Our goal is to build vibrant communities faster, cheaper, and better than they’re doing now,” he said.
In the case of JasperSoft:
We offer electronic support for the infrastructure. We have add-ons that allow them to pick up our community manager. Over time it’s our intention to offer fairly significant services because we have been in the space for 10 years.
Essentia’s ambition is to link the communities it’s managing. “Integrating and federating the communities is happening at multiple points, so you get a community of communities happening. That’s a big capability – you get layers of networks.”
If it works out, the communities Essentia manages become bigger, more complex, and more integrated than Sourceforge ever was. But you’ll never know it.
That’s the way Ganapathy and his team want it.
There’s a dose of irony here. Companies left Sourceforge to gain more control of their communities. Now they’re outsourcing those same sites. Essentia ate Sourceforge’s lunch and they never even heard the dinner bell.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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