Some members of the Rochen team have had the pleasure of attending and being the lead sponsor of three Joomla community driven events over the past few months. In addition to providing all of the joomla hosting services for the official Joomla websites, Rochen also sponsors many community organized events around the world called Joomla Days.
Sponsoring Joomla Days gives Rochen another way to help support the Joomla project and wider open source community as well as affording us a great networking opportunity to link up with both current and potential clients in the Joomla community. Meeting up in person adds an extra layer of value, although one that is hard to measure in pure dollar terms from a business prospective.
Brad Baker from Rochen’s team, who is also a member of the Joomla Core Team, attended Joomla Day Melbourne on February 7th and Martin Rouf and I attended both Joomla Day UK in Maidstone, Kent on March 13th and 14th as well as Joomla Day Las Vegas on April 4th. Rochen was the lead sponsor of all three events providing financial and logistical support to help keep the costs down for attendees.
Joomla Day Melbourne
Brad delivered a keynote presentation at the Melbourne Joomla Day on joomla security covering both the basics and more in depth steps you need to take to secure your Joomla site. It is worth pointing out that if you are hosting at Rochen then a lot of the security ground work is already done for you and you will not run into issues like file ownership or permissions problems here.
The organizers of Joomla Day Melbourne have not yet got the video of Brad’s presentation up, but you can watch his 2008 keynote here.
Joomla Day UK ans Las Vegas
At the the Joomla Day in the UK I delivered a presentation to the whole group detailing the type of traffic Rochen handles for Joomla across the official sites (23 million page views for February 2009, in case you were wondering!) as well as some of the ‘cool’ things we are doing here at Rochen like our Rochen Vault Managed Backup system and our recent move into the green hosting arena. Both in the UK and Las Vegas Martin and I hosted a round table Q&A session on Joomla security answering people’s questions and addressing some of their concerns. Rochen even managed to pick up a few new hosting and reseller hosting clients from the sessions which was pretty neat.
Rochen’s Las Vegas Dinner and After-Party!
To coincide with Joomla Day Las Vegas Rochen also organized a dinner at Valentino’s Fine Dining and an after-party at Tao Beach nightclub for any of our customers who wanted to attend as a way to say thank you for their business and also to gain valuable face-to-face feedback. We like to organize these type of events at least once a year and have hosted our customers in London, UK; Vancouver, Canada and San Francisco, CA in previous years. In Las Vegas this year we had around 40 customers attend.
Future Events?
We don’t have anymore Joomla Days on the Rochen calendar right now but we will keep customers posted via our forums when that changes. There is a good chance Brad will be attending an event in Vietnam later in the year and there is talk of a Joomla related event in New Orleans in late October. Likewise, we will keep everyone posted of the next Rochen dinner and after-party. Although not Joomla related Martin and I will be at HostingCon in Washington DC this August and PubCon in Las Vegas this November.
Special Thanks
That just leaves me with a few people to thank. Andy Wallace did a tremendous job with organizing Joomla Day UK, as did Toni Marie Swats with the Las Vegas event and Matthias Raab in Melbourne. Rochen provides the support we can for Joomla Days but these three people put hundreds of hours of work in to actually make these events happen with no financial return for themselves. Kudos to them all.
I also want to thank Allen Gunn (aka “Gunner”) from Aspiration for facilitating the Las Vegas event. I have been to two events that Gunner has facilitated now, the first being Joomla Day Mountain View at the Googleplex (Google’s HQ) in May 2007 and this event in Las Vegas. Both these events are amongst best I have ever been at. If you are looking for a facilitator for an open source event then drop Aspiration an email.
I want to give a quick mention to Matt Olander from IX Systems, Ryan Ozimeck from PICnet and Aaron St.George from The Uptime Institute for helping keep things on track at the Joomla Day and at the Rochen dinner and after-party. Aaron was our designated transportation coordinator towards the end of the night! Finally, a big thank you to everyone at Joomla and Rochen’s customers for making the trip to these Joomla Days and the Rochen dinner, we appreciate it more than you know.
So until the next Joomla Day and Rochen party…
– Chris
P.S. A lot of people at the events asked about Rochen’s Joomla security check list. You can find it here: Joomla Security Check-List.
Chris Adams is the Founder and CEO of Rochen, a web hosting provider specializing in providing a performance tuned hosting platform for dynamic database driven scripts like Joomla! Rochen has hosted all of the official Joomla! websites since the project began in August 2005.