Community Program

The community program: tailored for individuals

Does this apply to me ?

If you are an individual, present in the eZ Community for some time or very new to it, the answer is YES.
If you represent a company, the answer is YES too, but you need to read more on the Community Partner Program.

What are the requirements ?

As an individual, you only need to be a registered member of the community. This means you have to have an account on share.ez.no, the eZ Community portal. If not already the case, you can do so here: http://share.ez.no/user/register.

How does this actually work and why should I be active ?

Why should I get involved ?

• To help others and be helped
• To get personal recognition and gratification
• To benefit from career opportunities through visibility
• To be eligible to more advanced roles in the eZ Community: forum moderator, member of the share.ez.no team, etc.

How does this work ?

Being a registered member allows you to actively participate to the community's life. If you already were a registered member, basically nothing changes for you, you still are free to create new forum topics, reply to existing ones, create blog posts, articles, etc, all of this embracing mutual respect and etiquette. The latter are thoroughly described here Etiquette, blogging and usage guidelines.

Your activity will result in visibility. Basically, any action will bring about a bunch of points. The rewarded types of activity are:

• Knowledge creation: articles & tutorials, blogging
• Entropy creation: forum activity and animation
• Contributions: code (http://projects.ez.no), bug reports
• Sponsoring (advocacy): invite someone new to register and discover the eZ Community

This list can be extended at any moment, and you will be notified in such a case.

All past activity will be taken into account, making sure your involvement history is kept. The activity level will be used as main sort criteria in the “white pages” of the eZ Community, http://share.ez.no/directory/people, and will result in a public statistics page allowing to measure your global activity in the eZ Ecosystem.

How do I get involved ?

A full brush-up on how to get involved is proposed here: http://share.ez.no/get-involved. This is THE place to start if you are new here. It can also give you good hints, even if you are a long distance member.

Why would I want my company, or me as a freelancer, to become Community Partner ?

If you are professionally working with eZ Software, and would like to participate in the eZ Community as such (on top of your activity as an individual), you may want to consider a form of partnership with eZ Systems. Two types of partnership can serve your initiative:

• Community Partnership: free and mostly designed for small business, usually sensed as a first step in making business around eZ Publish. Read how this can help your business to take off: “The community Partner program”.
• Business Partnership: commercial engagement with the editor, triggering a close relationship with eZ Systems' forces to have your business be sustainable. Read more here: http://ez.no/partners/business_partner_program

The community Partner program: an add-on made for companies and freelancers

What are the benefits of Community Partnership for my company ?

Community Partnership is the natural continuation of the Community Program, applied to companies and freelancers. It helps them start and grow business around eZ Publish, and eventually reach the next level of a successful activity with eZ Software. Benefits:

• Visibility :
  In the “Yellow pages” of the eZ Community ( http://share.ez.no/directory/companies ), where Community Partners are ranked by their aggregate activity. This public visibility, strongly associated with the eZ brand, means business.
  As Community Partner you also are allocated a public profile page, where your company's description, contact info, references and members' listing are likely to grab attention.
• Contact with business professionals :
  All Community Partners will have access to eZ's Partner Days. Four times a year the business ecosystem gathers to receive premium insight on eZ's strategy, exchange field-knowledge on how to improve value-capture when working with eZ Publish, and simply...get in contact for potential collaborations. The partner days are known as strong business boosters.
• Job board access [to come]:
  The eZ Community is full of highly skilled and experienced eZ Publish developers, project leaders, designers looking for business anywhere in the world. The job board, and their profile pages will let you quickly find your man and speed your project pace up. Direct consequence, you can post your availability (as a company or freelancer) in this highly visible place.

[ register now ]

Does my company qualify ?

Very few requirements are to be met to become a Community Partner :

1. Be a company
   This means having a legal status enabling you to engage business relationships. There is absolutely no requirement regarding the amount of employees in your company, leaving the door wide open to freelancers.
2. One live eZ Publish reference

The visibility granted to an engaged company is based on its members' activity (cf how activity is measured). This means that in order to associate community members to a company's profile, they need to be registered (cf community program requirements).

[ register now ]

But my company is already a Business Partner... ?

The Business Partner Program focuses on the commercial activity, its main performance indicator, but remains tightly linked to the community program on one point: all community-related activity of a Business Partner is taken into account. This is automatic when registering for business partnership, and brings a substantial visibility on the community side (depending on the intensity of the Business Partners's community participation).

A pathway to more business ?

...only if you feel like it!

At any time a Community Partner is able to join the Business Partner Program if he is willing to grow his business in collaboration with the commercial part of eZ Systems' organization, most likely after having quick-started a substantial business activity with eZ Publish by being Community Partner. To facilitate this transition, and only for those who feel like it, eZ is willing to bring the five most active Community Partners into the Business Partner Program, free of charge, for one year. More details on what the Business Program is : http://ez.no/partners/business_partner_program.

You may as well have reached a confortable cruising speed, thanks to the Community Partner status, suiting your current expectations, which you would not like to push ahead. Feel free to remain an active Community Partner, keeping high on sharing, participating to the eZ Community's life.

They decided to lend a hand

The share.ez.no team

These guys are the engine behind this portal, as well as other bits of our online community galaxy.

See http://share.ez.no/team/who-is-who for a glance on their bios. You can follow their activity through their blog : http://share.ez.no/blogs/share.ez.no-team, available through RSS along with the other blogs on this platform : http://share.ez.no/rss/feed/blogs.

If you feel like joining and push the eZ Community portal to the next level, contact community [at ]ez [dot] no.