Opened Specifications: Drawing the Next Platform with the Community

eXo is taking a new step toward openness by opening the product specifications to the community.

Being open source has many advantages. Because you have thousands of eyes watching you, you get help finding and fixing bugs and generating new ideas. Being an open source platform is even better because you get people building things you did not think about. You also get users speaking out, commenting, praising, and sometimes struggling with the product. Overall, supporting the community of an open source platform is an immensely rewarding experience. You feel really useful doing something for others.

At eXo, we are lucky to live that experience daily with our community.

Over the last few months, eXo has taken significant steps to become more open and to engage more with the community. We moved our code to GitHub, making the codebase much easier to follow and contribute to. Then came the adoption of the LGPL, followed by the eXo Add-ons initiative to provide an area where developers can host their eXo extensions and apps.

Beyond code, we are constantly making it easier anyone to get involved. Take the translations service for example. It lets you translate eXo into your native language. Enabling comments on our documentation website made it very easy to tell us when something doesn’t work right. And of course, we blog more than ever, sharing every step of our projects.

As of today, we are giving the eXo community a new opportunity to influence and contribute to the future of eXo Platform by moving the product specifications on the community website. Specifications reflect the ongoing and upcoming features to be developed by eXoers.

A space called “eXo Platform 4.1” has been created, and current specifications have been added in the space’s wiki. At this stage, there are a dozen of them covering small improvements and bigger topics of all kinds: notifications, calendar improvements, document sharing, new APIs, etc. and many more to come!

We have many ideas, but we value yours too. The good thing about contributing to specifications is that you don’t have to be a developer (though you can!). You just need to have good ideas and some time to write them down. It’s a chance to fine-tune the features before they are sealed in code.

Don’t hesitate; all opinions, ideas, and contributions are welcome. You can discuss existing specs or even start your own if you‘d like. Don’t wait – jump in!

Brahim Jaouane

I am a Digital Marketing specialist specialized in SEO at eXo Platform. Passionate about new technologies and Digital Marketing. With 10 years' experience, I support companies in their digital communication strategies and implement the tools necessary for their success. My approach combines the use of different traffic acquisition levers and an optimization of the user experience to convert visitors into customers. After various digital experiences in communication agencies as well as in B2B company, I have a wide range of skills and I am able to manage the digital marketing strategy of small and medium-sized companies.