Announcing Mage-OS Nederland

For history's sake

For years (and actually from the very first beginning of Magento 1.0), the Dutch Magento community has been carried by Dutchento (carried by Guido Jansen and later backed by Sander Mangel as well). But in the past couple of years, the activity was on a decline and the founders moved away from Magento. And COVID happened. And life.

But it didn't mean the popularity of Magento itself was on a decline: We are still working daily with Magento, initiatives like Hyvä and Mage-OS show that the community is very much alive. So we - Jeroen Boersma (Elgentos), Peter Jaap Blaakmeer (Elgentos), Sander de Graaf (3WebApps), Sanne Bolkenstein (Hyvä), Willem Wigman (Hyvä) and yours truly - sat down and started to talk about how to bring the mojo back to the Dutch ecosystem.

A non-profit foundation

Pretty soon after this conversation started, we came to the conclusion that the healthiest option to include anyone in the community would be to start some kind of non-profit organization. In the end, we settled for an association (vereniging) with limited liability (this might need to change in the future), which was founded And the initiators became interim board member.

The association was named Mage-OS Nederland - after the world-wide Mage-OS organization - to stipulate our closeness to that other great initiative, but also to support the open source nature of Magento (and thus Mage-OS).

Activities

There are various reasons to found Mage-OS Nederland: One of them is to inform merchants better on the topic of Magento (aka Adobe Commerce aka Mage-OS aka ... confusing right?). Likewise, there have always been events (like Meet Magento NL) backed by volunteers from the community. It would be good if the new association is also able to facilitate this, one way or another.

It doesn't mean necessarily that an event like Meet Magento NL is going to be organized by Mage-OS Nederland. No, organizing such an event is totally different business than running a foundation. However, a working group could be setup to work on such an MMNL event and that could be backed up (or perhaps even funded) by Mage-OS Nederland. In a similar way, I'm organizing as Yireo a MageUnconference NL 2023 next summer. I will be able to carry this (organizing, funding, driving) but will need help with promoting it. Mage-OS Nederland will not be responsible for this, but could be faciliting where possible.

There are many other things that can be done - hackathons, other events like MageTitans, organizing sit-downs with merchants, flyers, Webwinkel Vakdagen presence, etcetera. But let's not take all steps at once.

First member meeting and New Year's drink

We already had a first meetup on November 4th in Utrecht. To pick up on the new association properly as well, a members meeting will be held on January 19th 2023, most likely somewhere in Utrecht as well. And after the official meeting, there will be room for a community meet & greet aka New Year's drink with osseworst. Details will follow.

Besides the good news and the celebration that there is good news, we also need to be serious: A new association is meaningless if we don't make actual steps. Besides the activitities mentioned above (which are most likely more part of separate working groups) a new board needs to be elected, membership fees need to be determined, articles of the association need to be composed, etcetera. We are with that also calling the community to help us with this: Many hands make light work. Let us know if you can help out.

Where are you?

Currently, the new Mage-OS Nederland association can be reached via different means:

• The official Mage-OS Nederland site lists further details;
• There is a LinkedIn company page;
• The Dutchento slack is still used frequently by us and others;
• But we like the Mage-OS Discord with channel #mage-os-nl better;
• Email and other social media will still follow;

Hope to hear from you what your thoughts are about "community", "Magento" and "The Netherlands" (and preferably a mix of these words in one sentence).