Six more weeks of winter lie ahead, making the forthcoming frigid days perfect for starting or tweaking an Omeka project. The Omeka team will be working hard as well in February during the newly-designated “Omeka Outreach Month.”

We plan to write a few blog posts, seek assistance with plugin and theme development, and drop a new version at the end of the month featuring new themes and updated plugins. We also want to tweet new Omeka projects, so please share URLs:

• in an email: outreach at omeka dot org;
• on Twitter: @omeka;
• or by posting to the Showcase wiki.

To kick off the month, we set up a Designer-Developer Marketplace forum to serve as a virtual meeting space where anyone looking to showcase her/his Omeka design and development skills can connect with others in need of an experienced designer-developer.

If you want to help with Omeka outreach this month, contact us and we will send you some bookmarks to pass out at conferences or to impress your friends and co-workers.

Open-source projects need strong communities, and we want to extend our thanks to everyone for working together and sharing knowledge (and code) to build one around Omeka.

Are you going to the National Council on Public History meeting in Providence, RI? If you are interested in learning more about how Omeka can help with your public history projects, we are holding an informal workshop (aka “playdate”), on Thursday, April 2.

Visit the Omeka wiki to learn more and sign up for the NCPH workshop. Not going to NCPH? Look at the list of upcoming conference presentations–Omeka may be coming to your town soon.

We have scheduled 2 “playdates” for 20 interested users to come to CHNM and work with the Omeka team. In one room, 10 developers will work with the dev team to build plugins, hack themes, or add to the documentation. In the other room, 10 end users/content creators, will learn how to manage an Omeka archive and build exhibits.

If you’re interested, read the details and sign up on the Codex Wiki:

• February 20, 2009
• June 26, 2009.

We will also start posting dates of conference workshops/presentations in a new section of the Codex, Upcoming Workshops.

Stop in and see us sometime.

The Omeka development team is scheduling weekly developer chats on IRC. Our first chat was this afternoon at 2:30EST, and we had a good showing of both the core dev team along with users and coders from a variety of institutions including libraries and universities. For Q&A about hacking themes and plugins, and to talk more generally about developing with Omeka, join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net #omeka

Our next scheduled chat will be at 2:30EST on Friday, January 16th. I’ll talk to you then!

Omeka made an eventful showing at RepoCamp last Friday. Sponsored by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), RepoCamp was a “free and open event where folks who are interested in managing and creating digital repository software and their contents can gather and share ideas, innovations, trials and tribulations.” Many people expressed interest in Omeka and, more importantly, made suggestions about how it could be made better.

One thing that struck me was CRIG’s tagline: “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else.” This humbling yet pragmatic expression befits Omeka’s focus on an open and active community. We readily acknowledge that our users have some of the best ideas about how to use Omeka to its fullest potential. We get great ideas almost every day from our forums and our dev list. And the people at RepoCamp came up with some ingenious ways to harness new standards and technologies to improve and enhance our software. It is unmistakable that the coolest things being done with Omeka is done by you, our users.