Hello everyone, Over the past few years, the OFBiz community has continued to invest significant effort in modernizing the platform and keeping it relevant for today's technology landscape.
We have seen ongoing improvements across the framework and applications. More recently, the community has been exploring opportunities around REST APIs, AI-assisted development, coding agents, MCP integrations, modern deployment architectures, and other initiatives that help position OFBiz for the future. As a result, I believe OFBiz is increasingly evolving beyond its traditional ERP perception and is becoming a powerful open enterprise automation platform. While our technical community continues to grow and evolve, I wonder if we have a corresponding business community helping shape the future direction of OFBiz. Today we have developers, contributors, committers, implementers participating in the ecosystem. We have the developer mailing list for technical discussions and the user mailing list where users can seek support and ask questions. However, we seem to have limited participation from business practitioners and domain experts such as: - Supply chain specialists - Inventory management professionals - Manufacturing practitioners - Logistics experts - Procurement professionals - Accounting and finance experts - Retail operations leaders - Enterprise operations professionals Yet these are often the people closest to the real-world problems that enterprise software is intended to solve. Many of us work with customers every day and help solve complex operational challenges. Through those projects, valuable business requirements, workflows, process improvements, and industry insights are created. In many cases, these discussions remain within customer implementations, private repositories, or individual consulting engagements. This is completely natural, but it also means that the broader community may not always benefit from the knowledge being generated through those experiences. As OFBiz continues to evolve as an open enterprise automation platform, I believe business participation may become increasingly important in helping guide future priorities and opportunities. One idea I have been thinking about is whether it makes sense to create an Apache OFBiz Business Advisory Committee (ABC). The purpose of such a committee would be to create a forum where business practitioners and domain experts can engage with the OFBiz community and help us better understand modern operational challenges. Members might include supply chain leaders, manufacturing experts, inventory specialists, retail operations professionals, consultants, enterprise architects, and others willing to share experiences and discuss industry challenges in a generic and non-confidential manner. The goal would not be to discuss specific customer implementations, but rather to explore common business problems, emerging trends, operational challenges, and opportunities for innovation. These discussions could take place through periodic online meetings, roundtables, or open community sessions. As contributors and engineers, we could then use those discussions to: - Better understand real-world business challenges - Capture requirements and reference workflows - Identify gaps and opportunities - Help shape future OFBiz roadmaps - Build reusable community solutions - Strengthen OFBiz as an open alternative to proprietary enterprise platforms In many ways, this is similar to what many of us already do within customer projects. The difference is that the discussion would happen in an open community setting where the resulting knowledge could benefit the broader OFBiz ecosystem. I believe this could also introduce a new type of contributor to the OFBiz ecosystem: business practitioners who contribute domain expertise, workflows, requirements, and operational insights, just as developers contribute code and technical expertise. I understand that building such a community would not be easy, and participation would likely take time to develop. However, I believe it may be worth exploring. If successful, it could help us grow the business side of the OFBiz community, attract new participants, strengthen our understanding of modern enterprise challenges, and ultimately help OFBiz evolve into an even stronger enterprise automation platform. I would be interested in hearing what others think. Do others see a similar gap in business participation within the OFBiz community? Would a Business Advisory Committee provide value? How might we attract more business practitioners into the conversation? Have other Apache projects experimented with something similar? Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts. Thanks -- Divesh Dutta www.hotwaxsystems.com
