January first, 2016.
After a voting period the community formerly known as puppet-community changed their name to Vox Pupuli. There isn’t a formal date when puppet-community was founded. But we know the people that were involved in the early days:
By a lucky accident I had the chance to attend a puppet practitioner training in 2013. This was organized by Netways. I joined puppet-community in 2014 and was mostly lurking around. I became more active over time and nibalizer convinced me to make my first talk at a conference, Config Manangement Camp Berlin, 2016. I gave an ignite talk about Vox Pupuli, and the slides are still around.
People that had to endure my more recent talks might notice that I still use the same slide styleset as almost a decade ago, which I got from Mina back then. This is of course a homage to Mina, I’m not just lazy.
My ignite talk went well and I was happy to meet so so many people back then. It was a very friendly event with a welcoming community.
nibalizer did the second keynote in at Config Manangement Camp Berlin. He went on stage with a neck tie.
The message back then: Open source is serious business. And in a serious business you sometimes wear ties.
Almost a decade ago he already realized how important open source communities are and how much value they produce as a collective, and how much every individual contributor benefits from it.
Fast forward, July 2025
In the past months, I had the pleasure to organize the first Vox Pupuli conference, VoxConf. This was the first conference for many community members. The goal was to give them the same welcoming feeling as I had on my first conference.
The event was hosted by Netways, the same company that organized my puppet training back then. The recommended VoxConf hotel was the Park Inn hotel, where the training took place. My trainer back then was Lennart Betz, and I’m more than happy that we could convince him to not only give a talk at VoxConf, but also provide an awesome city tour the day before. The picture above was taken by Dirk Götz, who works for Netways and is deeply involved in the Foreman ecosystem. Vox Pupuli and Foreman are closely collaborating since years, so it made sense to me to host our event alongside the Foreman birthday party. ffrank wasn’t much active in the community for some time, so I was very happy to see him again at VoxConf. And of course I reused again the slide styleset from Mina.
And of course this had to happen:
Vox Pupuli has grown up. We are an active community that still grows after all those years. We maintain the majority of the puppet testing ecosystem, the most used modules and with OpenVoxProject we even have a “side project” which now provides open source packages as successors for the deprecated puppet agent/server/db.
I’m very grateful for my personal journey in the past decade and I feel honoured that you allow me to serve in the PMC since its establishment. I’m very happy for everything Vox Pupuli, we, the community, achieved in the past and I’m sure we will continue so in the future.
Famous words that you probably heard a lot from me, but were initially written by daenney and Mina:
What is Vox Pupuli? We provide a home for orphaned Puppet modules. Our goal is to unite lonely module and tooling authors to a collective and together we want to ensure continued development for our code.
Open source is serious business - nibalizer