The next generation of the community forge from open source business intelligence vendor JasperSoft says something about the intersection of business and technology, and how increasingly the people who live in these separate worlds are now crossing paths.

Now in open beta, JasperForge v2 was designed not just to meet the needs of hard-core developers, but also to support the increasing number of business users who want to take advantage of the platform to share and build projects. In some ways, their desire to be a part of the open source collaboration movement reflects the world they’re living in today—everyone is exposed to the freedom of social networks where they can form groups around common interests and goals.

”What was driving us is that the original open source projects focused on infrastructure—Linux, application servers, and so on, but now it’s moved up the stack and BIi tools are used by developers to build analytic applications and BI solutions,” says VP of Marketing Nick Halsey. “But a lot of end users are also using them and they want to interact with the JasperSoft community on more business- related topics.”

Noticing that among the 300 community projects on the forge ranged from coding to a reporting and analysis project for hospital bed management, JasperSoft partnered with Essentia to develop an enabling platform to support both the harder-core software development community and the scriptesr-masher-uppers-light-weight programmers who are building reports and want to have their discussions at the application level, not the language level.

“Originally setting up a project meant a place to write code together, but we were getting requests for support for projects to collaborate around a business application area or around a geographical area. So, we thought let’s enable users to set up open projects and pick the right set of functions. We’ve got hundreds of thousands of registered users, and they have to be able to self manage and customize to the type of project they envision.”

For example, a more business-oriented user may want to share a JasperSoft report they wrote around Sarbanes Oxley-compliance, while a developer might be more oriented to sharing tips and tricks.

 “The site is infinitely flexible in the way it can reflect the user experience,” says Halsey. “Someone can set up a project and say, do I need to write software? And maybe they don’t, but they do need a wiki to share information, they can set up that module to serve that need.” 

Those who register on the forge can define the user interface they want to have, the projects they want to participate in, the forum information they want to receive, and otherwise personalize their interaction with the open source community in a way they couldn’t before. Additionally, JasperSoft has focused on the analytics portion of the platform as well, to help it model user behavior and present the most useful information to users based on their activities. For example, if someone has posted a lot of questions on a Jasper reports forum, it can determine that person might be in need of training and can provide him information about iReport training classes or documentation that might be helpful.

There have been over 5 million downloads of the software, and Halsey estimates over 100,000 production deployments—he can prove 85,000. “What’s unique here is the opportunity and needs generated by serving such a large community. With over 300,000 unique visitors a month to the forge, all with their own unique sets of requirements for what they are trying to solve. This is a new social experiment, business experiment, and developer experiment.”