Asterisk Community Relations

beelinebill May 15th, 2008

I’ve been getting questions recently about changes in the Asterisk Community, specifically questions about Jared Smith and John Todd. Here’s the scoop:

Jared Smith, who came to Digium via the Sokol & Associates acquisition in July 2007, has accepted the position as Digium’s Training Manager. Jared has been Digium’s Community Relations Manager since joining Digium and is recognized globally as an Asterisk subject matter expert and is very well respected. We at Digium are thrilled to welcome Jared into this position.

John Todd has joined Digium as the Open Source Community Director. John has been an active Asterisk Community developer for 5 years and has contributed to the ecosystem growth by building and delivering Asterisk-based solutions for several companies — most recently as founder and CTO of TalkPlus, where he architected a high availability mobility solution. John will also play a key role in content development and delivery of Astricon (www.astricon.net) September 23-25, 2008. The Astricon event was originally created by Olle Johansson of Edvina and Steve Sokol in 2004 and is now under the Digium umbrella. John will be representing Digium in the community as Jared did, as well as working with the Asterisk Community to drive future strategies of open source Asterisk. Expect to see and hear more from John in the near future.

If you submitted a speaking proposal to Digium for Astricon, you will be hearing from John shortly. If you are interested in speaking, visit www.astricon.net and click on “Speaking Opportunities” on the left navigation bar. Abstracts will be accepted through June 1.

2 Responses to “Asterisk Community Relations”

  1. # Jared Smithon 16 May 2008 at 10:05 am

    Let me just add that I’m thrilled to be the new Training Manager for Digium, and that I couldn’t be happier with John Todd’s decision to join our team. I couldn’t pick a better person to continue on with the Community Relations duties. In fact, if it hadn’t been for John Todd’s examples and help when I first got started with Asterisk, I probably wouldn’t be a part of the Asterisk community today (and I would have never written the Asterisk book and started the Asterisk Documentation Project). And don’t worry — I’m not going to disappear. I’ll still do everything I can to make the Asterisk community thrive, even if it’s not my primary role at Digium anymore.

  2. # randuloon 06 Jul 2008 at 5:13 am

    Jared is a great guy and competent in many areas of asterisk lore and technology. So is John Todd whose credentials include publishing his heavily-commented asterisk config files at least three years ago and being able to speak live (and in a coherent manner) on the VoIP Users Conference while simultaneously chatting on multiple IRC channels.

    Mark tells me he heard we (VUC) were invited to Astricon to do our thing, but that was the first and last I ever heard of that.

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