Virgil Dodson: BIRT Exchange Turns Two Years Old
The BIRT Exchange Community site has been quite a busy place over the past two years. There are now over 21,000 registered members of BIRT Exchange from 157 different countries and over 30,000 unique visitors each month. There have been more that 15,000 new forum posts on BIRT Exchange over the past 2 years making BIRT Exchange the most active BIRT resource on the Internet. There were 32 webinars conducted from BIRT Exchange and over 500 BIRT related code examples, report designs, tutorials, and tips submitted to the DevShare area of BIRT Exchange. Some of these items have been viewed or downloaded more than 20,000 times.
This year we developed a contest designed to reward BIRT Exchange members for their valuable contributions to the site. The contest is called the DevShare Contributor of the Month contest and rewards the person who has submitted the most popular DevShare item each month with their choice of an animated BIRT Rocks! T-shirt, a set of BIRT books, or an iPod Shuffle.
We expanded the BIRT Exchange community this year by inviting BIRT partners to participate in our Global Partner Connection program. So far we have signed up 42 partners and many of these partners have become quite active in the forums and creating examples for the DevShare. This month we also launched the Beta of our Open Marketplace on BIRT Exchange and several partners have already added their items to the Application Showcase. We expect this to be one of the fastest growing areas of BIRT Exchange this year.
We hired an official Community Manager this year who will focus on engaging the BIRT Exchange community. Watch for new and cool changes this year designed to increase the participation and amount of valuable resources available on BIRT Exchange.
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