I've often talked about how special the Notes community is. And while special can sometimes mean "special" (in a not-flattering way), I honestly have a very warm place in my heart for those IT professionals who use, administer, and develop with Notes and Domino.

The yearly trip to Lotusphere is often like a homecoming. I get to see people I've talked to all year, get to look at what they're working on, and in a few "special" cases, wonder just how they could consume so much alcohol and keep on going.

OpenNTF is an embodiment of that special feeling. This is how the OpenNTFers describe themselves:

OpenNTF is a site devoted to getting groups of individuals all over the world to collaborate on Lotus Notes/Domino applications and release them as open source. Our mission is "to provide a framework for the community to develop open source applications for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino which may be freely distributed". Using open source applications can help organizations reduce the costs of software development and maintenance.

The site is organized into a number of sections including The Main Bar (which contains project and technical discussions), The Code Bin, which contains loads of interesting code snippets, and The Application Catalog which is a library of 160 Notes applications including blogging tools, wikis, log analysis, spam managers, and more.

There's a blog (and, apparently, a podcast), RSS feeds, information about how you can get involved, and more. If you haven't yet explored (and, better yet, contributed to) the OpenNTF.org project, you're in for quite a treat. That's why we award OpenNTF.org the DominoPower Site of the Month for February 2006.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.