COMMON Youth Movement Continues at POWERUp 2025
May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie
Here’s a shocking fact for you: Disneyland was only five years old when the COMMON user group started way back in 1960. While Mickey Mouse hasn’t aged much, the folks who belong to COMMON and attend events sure have. But if the user group’s latest initiative succeeds, the current trend toward younger and more globally diverse members will continue well into the next decade – and beyond.
The aging of the installed base has been an issue that COMMON has been attempting to rectify for much of the past decade. It’s not necessarily a COMMON problem, but a problem for the IBM i platform as a whole. As the Baby Boomers who made up a large contingent of IBM i professionals have retired, died, or otherwise left the platform, there hasn’t been an influx of folks from newer generations to take their place.
This has created a skills problem for the IBM i platform that IBM has also been forced to deal with. Big Blue has responded in part by expanding education through the Power Skills Academy (formerly IBM Academic Initiative for Power). It also has tried to modernize the platform itself by bringing more modern tools and technologies into it, including supporting open source development tools and promoting Web-based interfaces. That has helped to shorten the platform’s learning curve a tad, and lead to fewer instances where young people say: “You want me to work with THAT?!” when presented with a 5250 green screen for the first time.
COMMON has made some tweaks to its formula for POWERUp. For instance, it has added more networking opportunities and more time between sessions to create connections and ultimately to create more fun. It’s adding more non-technical events and sessions. Half of the 300 or so sessions at this week’s conference are brand new.
“Our goal is to ensure the next 65 years,” COMMON president Floyd Del Muro said during POWERUp 2025 open session Monday morning. “And we’re going to do that by slowly transitioning kind of the chemical makeup of what is COMMON today. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s just going to be gradual. It’s going to be one drop at a time. And hopefully it turns into that waterfall that we’re hoping that happens.”
POWERUp 2025 is taking place at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California.
The COMMON board of directors is also trying out some new techniques to liven things up and attract a younger crowd. The Chicago-based user group gives free memberships to students, and about a dozen of those students are in attendance at the COMMON POWERUp 2025 event that’s taking place at the Disneyland Hotel through Thursday of this week.
“These are some of the most talented young people I’ve ever met,” Del Muro said. “We have people that are interested in doing AI full stack. We have a white hat hacker. These are people that are leading associations in their age group. So this is the kind of talent that we want to attract.”
This youth movement was clearly evident at last year’s POWERUp, which took place in Fort Worth, Texas. That event topped 1,100 attendees, which was a multi-year high, and 2024 COMMON crowd looked noticeably younger than previous events. This year’s show in Anaheim seems to have the same youthful appearance and fresh vibe, with 1,200 attendees, according to Del Muro.
For instance, in addition to the college students in attendance, a good percentage of the 500 or so people who attended the opening session Monday morning raised their hands when asked if they were attending POWERUp for the first time. It’s all part of the plan to expand the reach of COMMON to younger people to ensure the organization’s continued existence, according to Del Muro.
The POWERUp 2025 opening session took place Monday, May 19, 2025. (Image courtesy Zend by Perforce)
“This is all to drive this community so that we can transition and match up appropriately where we need to be in 2030,” Del Muro said. “We provide free membership, and we also entice them to join New to IBM i (N2i), which is an organization where we provide mentorship. We provide a test server for them to work with. We kind of give them a yellow brick road, if you will – I know that’s not Disney – but we give them a yellow brick road in which they can follow and start to build their path and their careers. And I’m going to tell you, these kids are already well beyond where I was when I came into this marketplace.”
You don’t have to be a teen or a 20-something to help bend IBM i the needle in the youthful direction. Even folks who transition to the IBM i platform as a mid-life career change can help to reinvigorate IBM i. No better example of that is the story of N2i director Rochelle “Shelly” Petty, who was presented with the John Earl Speaker Award by Brian May, the president of the COMMON Education Foundation. The Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship, meanwhile, went to Carol Woodbury, the IBM i security expert.
The opening session that Del Muro hosted with Common Europe board member Steve Bradshaw was also extra lively; it even featured a safe word in case the audience thought things were getting a little too spicy. It came close at times, thanks to the explanation on the difference between science-fiction and fantasy (among other comments). But in the end, Bradshaw never had to use his safe word (Lemon Jell-O) in anger.
The youth movement at COMMON extends beyond one annual POWERUp conference held in the United States. For example, the user group has started hosting Spanish-only virtual events for the Latin America crowd. Those events are so popular that it has attracted Spanish people from as far away as Poland and Israel. COMMON has also worked with Japanese IBM i user groups to supply some English-language education, and it’s working to bring in some Japanese speakers as well. Then there was the first ever COMMON conference to take place in India.
“We were fortunate enough to go in February and it was nothing short of a success,” Del Muro said. “And the crowd? I did not see as many gray hairs in that crowd in COMMON India as I do here. Very young crowd, very energetic crowd, very socializing crowd. We’re very excited and we will return to India next year. We’re looking at potentially Hyderabad. We’re moving it around between two or three cities.”
POWERUp 2026 will take place in New Orleans, with Denver, Colorado, to follow in 2027.
The global, multi-lingual movement has paid dividends for COMMON’s learning management system, or LMS. According to Del Muro, COMMON is extending the reach of its LMS to provide native language education in Swedish, French, and Italian. And even our friends in the UK will be able to get education in their native tongue.
“Your LMS is the envy of the world,” Bradshaw told Del Muro. “What we do in the UK is pay a fee to you, thanking you for that and let our members use your education as well. So for those people in the room who have contributed to the LMS, I personally thank you. You are doing a wonderful job. For those of you who haven’t yet and think you have something to give, please speak to one of the board members…and put your session forward. We need your brains.”
POWERUp 2025 still has two more days to go, but already it’s looking like the board members have succeeded in diversifying the attendees in a more youthful direction. That is good news both for the folks who regularly attend COMMON events, who participate in the activities, and who partake of the benefits of IBM i community and friendship. But it’s also good news for those IBM i professionals who stay back at the office, who keep the servers running, and who would like to have a successful platform to call home for the next 20 years of their careers. This week’s show accomplishes both of those tasks.
“I implore you, when you go back to your places of work, tell your bosses what value you got,” Bradshaw said. “Tell them about the future you are seeing and the fact that this is not just a technical conference, and implore them to come along, even if it’s to attend just this sort of summit, shake a few hands, meet a few senior executives from IBM, and then I hope they will see the value that you all see in this wonderful platform.”
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