[OOTB-hive] Passing of marsbard

[Axel Faust]

Hello everyone,

some of you may have already read our tweet from today, but we want to
make sure that members who do not use Twitter are also informed.

This morning, Daren informed the rest of the board that, sadly, Martin
Cosgrave (@marsbard) unexpectedly passed away this weekend, aged 48.
This obviously came as a shock to all of us - Daren had last talked with
Martin as recently as Thursday. From what we have learned over the
course of the day, Martin passed away in his sleep due to a heart
attack. Daren is in contact with Martin's friends and family, and will
keep us informed as may be relevant for us / our members to pay our
respect or submit our condolences to his family and friends.

For those on the list who may have not have been involved with the Order
of the Bee from the beginning, Martin Cosgrave was one of the initial
founders of the order, being a vocal proponent of Alfresco remaining
open source and - at a time when the corporate focus of Alfresco seemed
to be shifting with a new CEO, Jeff leaving Alfresco and Summit being
cancelled - setting up some sort of community organisation to help unify
our many voices and make Alfresco (re-)realize the value of the open
source community. Martin served as one of the initial members of the
board, worked in the infrastructure / distribution committees to manage
our technical systems and try to develop the idea of Honeycomb, a
pre-packaged distribution of Alfresco Community including commonly used,
validated addons from within the community. While ultimately this idea
did not pan out, it was not for a lack of effort and persistence on
Martin's part. Even when his regular job no longer revolved around
Alfresco, he continued to invest part of his personal time to work on
the various ideas he had championed and the resulting tasks. Martin was
also involved in the planning and execution of the first BeeCon
conference 2016 in Brussels, with which we successfully filled the void
left by Alfresco cancelling Summit, and which eventually helped Alfresco
rediscover the value of developer conferences, leading to a continuation
of DevCon in 2018.

I am sure everyone among us who knew and worked with Martin personally
will miss him, and we all will remember him for how he has enriched and
helped shape our community.


Axel