Leadership Blog

Proposed 2012 CLT Goals

wendy.robinson@forum.joomla.org (Wendy Robinson) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 05:18:45 +0000

For the first part of the 2012 budget process, the CLT has come up with the following goals.

Goal #1: Final Rollout of the New Site Templates

Task: Rollout each new site template as they are ready

Task: Open up a channel where people can provide feedback and report any usage issues

Task: Respond to reported issues

Target Date for Completion: As they are ready, between now and February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #2: Assess the amount of data channels currently in use and try to condense where possible

Task: Have a team of individuals from the CLT perform an analysis of the current community channels and see where some merging of resources and content can be done.

Task: Combine research into a document to share with the CLT and request community feedback as well.

Target Date for completion: February 2012

Resources required: Volunteer time.

Goal #3: Rollout Paid features for JRD/JED Directories.

Task: Implement payment system

Task: Define rules and guidelines, terms and conditions

Task: Testing period before launch

Target Date for completion: January 2012 for task #1 and #3. As soon as requested legal guidance is provided for Task #2

Resources Required: Legal guidance and documentation, which needs to be provided through OSM. This has been requested, currently waiting for that information.

Goal #4: Template Directory (JTD) Launch

Task: Launch a working version of the Template Directory

Task: Recruit a team of editors and put it to work

Resources Required:

Legal guidance and documentation to determine that the Terms of Use for the site are aligned with our ™
Possible Travel for team members to meet face to face
Volunteer time is also required.

Target Date for completion: February 2012

We'd like to thank all of the volunteers on the various CWG teams who have helped to make the above goals possible for 2012. The Joomla community is lucky to have so many hard working people making these exciting things happen!

We invite the community to provide feedback here in the CWG group of the Joomla People site: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1371-2012-proposed-clt-goals.html?groupid=398

Proposed PLT 2012 Goals

atarr@tarrconsulting.com (Andrea Tarr) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 23:57:12 +0000

As part of the normal budgeting process, the Production Leadership Team has come up with four goals for 2012. Those goals concern releases of the Joomla Platform and the Joomla CMS, continuing maintenance updates, and outreach and promotion to a technical audience.

Community feedback requested on OSM's top 2012 goal ideas

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:29:08 +0000

As part of the Joomla! project's 2012 goal setting and budget planning proposed process, the Open Source Matters board of directors (OSM) has come up with some ideas for possible top OSM 2012 goals and priorities. Those ideas are listed below.

2012 Goal setting and budget planning proposed process

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:29:08 +0000

With an October 25th announcement on the public Joomla! leadership email list, work has begun on the Joomla! project's 2012 goal setting and budget planning proposed process. 2011 was the first year that the Production Leadership Team (PLT), Community Leadership Team, (CLT) and Open Source Matters board of directors (OSM) put in the extra effort to first define their goals for the year before they began work on their parts of the project's overall budget.

Roadmap Meeting Recap

atarr@tarrconsulting.com (Andrea Tarr) — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We'd like to thank everyone who participated in the experimental Joomla Roadmap Meeting that was held last Friday live in NYC and virtually via live streaming on Ustream and twitter. This meeting was looking at the next major revision of Joomla after the long-term support release 2.5 comes out in a few months.

Roadmap Meeting Streaming Live

atarr@tarrconsulting.com (Andrea Tarr) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We will be having live streaming of the Joomla Roadmap Meeting happening in New York City this Friday, October 21. The meeting is scheduled to start at 10 am EDT. See this link for the time in your area: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Joomla+Roadmap+Meeting&iso=20111021T10&p1=12&ah=7

The link to the stream is http://www.ustream.tv/channel/joomla-roadmap. During the breakout sessions in the afternoon, we will be adding a second stream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/joomla-roadmap-ch2 if needed. (Edited to change the second link)

The suggested twitter hash for this meeting is #jroadmap.

Proposed leadership structure changes & request for community feedback

paul.orwig@community.joomla.org (Paul Orwig) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:00:00 +0000

At the Joint Leadership Summit (JLS) held in San Jose, California from July 29-31, 2011, one subject which received a lot of attention was our project’s leadership structure. It was widely felt that making some changes to our project’s leadership structure can strengthen communication and collaboration between teams, as well as improve oversight and accountability for all contributors and teams. The proposed changes aim to improve productivity and community engagement throughout all areas of the project.

Roadmap Meeting Call for Lightning Talks

atarr@tarrconsulting.com (Andrea Tarr) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 13:01:23 +0000

We have set up the basic agenda for the Roadmap Meeting taking place in NYC on Friday, October 21. The first part of the meeting will be a series of lightning talks where people present their feature or the feature they'd like to see. This will give the attendees a sense of what people are working on. We'd then use that as a basis for breaking into different groups for the rest of the day.

During the afternoon, people will go to the breakout sessions they are interested in. These breakout sessions are a time to get something accomplished on the project. It might be defining needs or goals. It might be coming up with specifications for the coding. It might be setting up the structure for a working group and identifying people for different tasks. Each individual project will be at a different stage from ironing out the concept to assigning people to specific tasks.

This is what the schedule looks like:

Seven Steps to Successful Joomla! Platform Evangelism

ryan.ozimek@opensourcematters.org (Ryan Ozimek) — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 23:07:22 +0000

I'm pretty darn excited about the Joomla! Platform. Actually, that is my biggest understatement of 2011.

I believe that the Joomla Platform has an opportunity to be one of the fastest growing development platforms of 2012, enabling the more than 200,000 Joomla developers around the world to break the bonds of CMS development and dive head-first into a world of ever-more global, mobile, and social applications.

Joomla devs building a J!Platform app at Joomla!Day UK 2011

Evangelizing about something as opaque as a development platform is a bit of a challenge. There's been many times where developers and end-users alike will attend one of my talks ask, "what's an example of what someone can build with the platform?" It’s easier to understand how something can be useful to your own needs when it’s laid out with specific deliverables and products.

Get involved with the future roadmap

atarr@tarrconsulting.com (Andrea Tarr) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:15:37 +0000

Joomla 2.5 is due out in January, which is the culmination of the 1.6/1.7/2.5 series. Now is the time to be mapping out those things we want to accomplish in the next series, which will culminate in the 3.5 release in July 2013.

At the recent joint summit we discussed the process for establishing goals and milestones for the long-term Joomla releases. We want more seats at the table for the technical discussions on how to move things forward. Once every six months the PLT and developers will meet just before or after an existing event to work on the roadmap.

Our first Roadmap Meeting will be on Friday, October 21, 2011 in New York City, the day before Joomla! Day NYC 2011. This is a working session that is open to anyone interested in working on designing or creating features for the next major release of Joomla. Our goal is to come out of this meeting with working documents for implementing different features.

There is no cost to attend the event but you must register in advance. Not everyone with an interest in working on this will be able to attend in person so we are exploring options for including virtual attendees.

We encourage everyone to have a voice and to vote or add ideas to the Idea Pool at ideas.joomla.org.

For details or to register to attend the meeting in person, see the posting in News at the Developer site.

Comments are welcome and can be shared in at the JPeople site in this thread

See also the September 29 blog Roadmap Meeting Call for Lightning Talks.

New Community Leadership Team Members

wendy.robinson@forum.joomla.org (Wendy Robinson) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 20:52:16 +0000

A while back we wrote a blog post asking the community to nominate people that they felt would be good candidates to join the Community Leadership Team.

From those nominations, we are pleased to announce that we had selected six people. Four people accepted our invitation, while two chose to instead focus on their current volunteer roles in the community. We thank all of the people that we invited for their kind and thoughtful responses, as well as the Joomla Community for the many excellent suggestions.

So, to not keep you in suspense any longer, please join us in welcoming the following new CLT members:

Isidro Baquero - Related with Joomla since Mambo days, he owns a blog about Joomla in Spanish (www.gnumla.com). He started collaborating actively with the Joomla project during early 2010, when joined the moderator team as local moderator for the Spanish forum. After that, he continued to increase his involvement, joining JPeople community managers team and the JCM as Spanish editor during 2010, and becoming JPeople Communications Manager during 2011. Also, during 2011 summer he joined Joomla Tweet team and the Spanish Translation Team.

Milena Mitova - With more than 8 years of online marketing experience and a broad set of technical and project management skills, Milena uses her expertise in SEM (search engine marketing), analytics, and landing page optimization to create high-impact Joomla websites.
She works as an online marketing manager for FalconStor Software, Inc. and manages her own web design company - Complete Website Care. She also volunteers as an author and team member of Joomla! Community Magazine.

Olaf Offick - Olaf is an Internet Engineer (M.Sc.) working in Galway, Ireland. He is the founder of Learn Skills, a company providing high quality Learning Management Systems (LMS / LCMS / VLE) and Educational Materials to businesses, schools and government organisations. In the Joomla! community, Olaf currently works on the Joomla Forum team as a Global Moderator and forum Adminstrator.

Sander Potjer - The involvement with the Joomla community started back in 2008, as co-founder of the local Dutch community www.joomlacommunity.eu. In a short period they established a solid community with an active team of volunteers. The volunteers contribute by providing news, translations, documentation, forum support and by organization the Joomla User Groups (14 in a small country!) and the yearly Dutch JoomlaDays.

As you can see, these new members not only add to the skills and experience of the CLT but also bring representation from our International community, something that we feel is very important for our commitment to Internationalization which we discussed in depth at our recent summit.

Isidro, Milena, Olaf and Sander - Welcome! We are so very excited to have you on board of our team and we look forward to working with you. Thank you for taking on this added responsibility on top of all that you do already for our community.

If you would like to say your own welcome or note of congratulations, or have any other comments or questions, we welcome those in this thread on the Joomla! People site.

[edit - minor typo - 08/16/2011 - Wendy]

The Version Votes Are In

ron.severdia@community.joomla.org (Ron Severdia) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 16:25:49 +0000

Just over a week ago, the PLT had a summit in San Jose, CA and asked the community to vote on the next version number of Joomla. There were two options and both had their pros and cons. Calling the January 2012 release Joomla 1.8 would have provided continuity with the currently available 1.6 and 1.7 releases, but would have required explaining why it was the exception to the rule that x.5 means a long-term release. Calling the January 2012 release Joomla 2.5 would provide consistency going forward (and backwards to Joomla 1.5), but would be an odd "jump" in the numbering since there will be no Joomla 2.0. There were plenty of questions and much discussion around the options, but now the vote is in.

Click the image above for a larger version.

By a slim margin, the winner was Joomla 2.5. Seeing the makeup of the vote (it wasn't a landslide), it's clear that the community is sharply divided on the question. Hopefully, in conjunction with the 6-month development cycle, there will be clearer expectations in the future with regards to releases and support.

The vote was a way for the PLT to gauge the pulse of the community on this issue so the next steps are to prepare for the release of Joomla 2.5 in January 2012.

Thanks for voting!

To comment on this post, visit http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1276-vote-for-the-version.html?groupid=714

Summary of the Community Leadership Team Summit

wendy.robinson@forum.joomla.org (Wendy Robinson) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 23:20:46 +0000

Community Leadership Team Summit - 28th July and August 1st, 2011

Participants: Peter Martin, Wendy Robinson, Sandra Warren, Paul Orwig (Day 1)

Video participants: Matt Lipscomb, Brad Baker

The following is a summary of the topics discussed in the Community Leadership Team (CLT) Summit:

A. All current websites that are under overview of the CLT:

1. Joomla.org now has about 30 internationalized pages that are used to redirect non-English people to local Joomla community resources. However because of the new Joomla 1.7 banner, the localized link is currently unavailable.

Action item 1: reinsert the link to localized “Joomla Information Pages”.

Action item 2: get the “info pages” translated in more languages.

2. The community.joomla.org site seems to have a less important role then it used to have. Probably because of the success of the Magazine and People sub-websites.

Action item 3: we should communicate that *all* working group members should be able to post blog posts regarding joomla.org related matters.

3. The new ticket support system for the Joomla Extension Directory (JED) is working very well. Other teams might use the system for their own process communication as well. The “premium listings” idea is moving forward, but we’ll have to wait on a new design for the JED site before it can be implemented.

Action item 4: evaluate new design for JED.

Furthermore we’ll have to make a decision about the Joomla version compatibility buttons.

Action item 5: wait for a decision on the new Joomla version numbering, and create buttons for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

Finally we’ll need input for the “standards” information: what evaluation items for extensions should be included.

Action item 6: ask PLT / 3rd party extension developers for feedback on best practices for extensions.

4. There haven’t been any major changes regarding the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) besides one new featured hosting provider in the hosting provider section. It has been decided to honor Rochen as a featured hosting provider listing (Brad and Wendy were excluded from this discussion).

5. The forum, which is used for technical Joomla support, has been experiencing a great influx of spam the last year. Last May a new forum protection mechanism has been put in place. It decreased the amount of spammers drastically. The downside is that some people with dynamic IP addresses have problems reaching the forum because spammer’s IP addresses get automatically banned for some period. This resulted in three complaints from (non-spamming ;-) people over the last three months.

Action item 7: create a contact form for issues like these, and link from the forum.

The new Joomla versioning system will increase the maintenance of main boards and international subboards because those have to be created. It has been decided to only create boards for Long Time Support (LTS) versions.

Action Item 8: To ensure that we have enough forum coverage to support our users, we need to check in with any inactive moderators to see if their interest is still in being members of the Moderator team

6. The People website lacks some moderation features.

Action item 9: define the needed moderation features and write a Request For Proposals (RFP) to get the features developed.

7. JUGs
* 1st official Joomla book (from Person) was meant to be spread around all JUGs, but this did not work out as planned. There is an idea to try using coupons that people can use to order copies of the books
Sandra + Liam will arrange it for the next books that are released in the series
* be more proactive: identify areas / countries where no JUGs are active (or where they are inactive) and try to reactivate / support people in those areas to organize JUGs.

8. Currently joomla.org does not have a credits page to acknowledge current as well as all previous contributors to the sites and infrastructure areas (software/design/support services donated to the project for use). This is something that can be worked in with the site redesign which is currently in progress *link to people site redesign group.

B. New candidates for CLT:

The current CLT members have selected people from the nominations that were submitted by the community. Invitations have been sent out to these folks and once confirmation has been received from them, we will announce this and welcome them to the CLT publicly.

C. Ways to improve processes to become more proactive

Currently a lot of teams are functioning in a reactive way, in the sense that a lot of actions will be taken when people from the (international) community ask for help. E.g. a community from some country may ask for help regarding organizing a Joomladay. This behavior might result in some countries and areas that are not covered. Action item 10: We should come up with ways to be more proactive. E.g. find uncovered countries and motivate local communities to organize events.

D. Version labeling for JED and Forums

We need to request clarification from the PLT regarding the version numbering as this affects some areas such as the JED compatibility labeling and the categorizing of support forums. (note: discussed by PLT and put forth since for community feedback)

E. Joomla.org and its community are very English orientated.

While English is the common language in the software world, the majority of the world population don't speak English. For Joomla! to be successful in the non Anglo-Saxon world, we must invest more (time) in local foreign language communities. We would like to increase Joomla use as well as recruit more volunteers from the non-Anglo-Saxon world. We realize that there are communication issues and barriers for participation that need to be addressed.

F. Combined Summit Notes Discussed during the CLT meeting Day 2:

During the combined summit the following communication issues have been identified:

1. Language barriers. Sometimes our communication is too difficult (e.g. difficult English words and sentences too long) and too much fragmented over different communication channels. And joomla.org has too much information to translate all to local languages.

2. For some countries the concept of Joomladays is not always clear. Furthermore there’s too little marketing budget for local foreign language communities to promote Joomla.

3. Documentation about processes in local communities is sometimes lacking. Which makes it difficult for people to take over the organisation of local JUGS when current JUG organiser steps down.

4. Official communication from Joomla.org to foreign non-English communities is too sometimes too difficult, and not helpful with solving the actual problem. Official documents (e.g. trademark rules) have often not been translated into foreign non-English languages.

During the combined summit the following participation issues have been identified:

1. Missing overview of all countries/language entities and local communities

2. How to organize responsibilities and autonomy of local communities in relation with Joomla.org?

3. Cultural barriers - in some countries people are not always that outspoken to the international community, only within their own local community.

4. In some cultures/countries the standards of living are not as high as they are in the western world. Which causes that some people have too little time to participate because they need to have multiple jobs to make their living which leaves no time to participate. In that case working as volunteer doesn’t have much incentives / rewards back.

At the combined summit two new problems regarding joomla.org have been found: The International flags in the main menu are confusing visitors, as when they click on a flag they expect to be taken to a page that contains content and/or language packs respective to each flag. This creates an additional problem in that, by looking at those flags, one might assume that certain languages are missing.

Action item 11: find a better way to represent “internationalism” and create an image/button for the joomla.org website.

Another issue that has been brought forward is that the current joomla.org site is missing a search box.

Action item 12: find out why the search box has not been placed on the homepage, and put it there if needed.

During the combined summit we’ve decided to compile a spreadsheet to take inventory of countries, languages, regions, local communities, nature of those communities, and in what countries communities are missing. [action item solved]. Secondly we’ve divided the world in regions: North-America, South-America, Europe, Africa, Asia+Pacific. Each region gets assigned one or two regional community coordinators / contact persons who will help with making the inventory. After we have such an overview they will get in touch with the local communities to find our their needs (e.g marketing, translation), get information and opinions, and help with updating the Joomla Info Pages project (to redirect international people to the local community sites). A further update will be provided to the community when it is time to put this idea into action and request volunteer help.

In Closing...

we would like to say that we enjoyed our time at the summit so much. Not only together as the CLT but with our friends and fellow team members on the Open Source Matters board and the Production Leadership Team. It was a very productive and positive event and we thank everyone that we were able to attend the summit with, as well as the incredible Joomla Community, whom without, we would not have been able to take part.

Comments and Discussion are welcome in this thread at the Joomla! People site.

Report from the OSM Summit - San Jose 2011

ryan.ozimek@opensourcematters.org (Ryan Ozimek) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:29:23 +0000

After three long days at the Joomla Leadership Summit, a team of eleven Open Source Matters members from four continents met in San Jose, California for our annual summit. Yes, much pizza was eaten. No, we didn’t spend too much time swimming in the hotel pool. Instead, we worked hard through seven sessions to pack as much Joomla goodness into two days as possible. We recognized that we couldn’t solve all our challenges in this short period, so we created small groups and focused on action items to help build momentum and progress.

Your OSM team, from left-to-right: Akarawuth Tamrareang, Thomas Hampton, Marijke Stuivenberg, Ryan Ozimek, Altansukh Tumenjargal, Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Jacques Rentzke, Sandy Ordonez, Paul Orwig, Dianne Henning

Now, for your viewing pleasure, here’s our report-back to the community.

Joint Summit Report

alice.grevet@opensourcematters.org (Alice Grevet) — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 21:16:35 +0000

Joint Summit Attendees:

CLT: Peter Martin, Paul Orwig, Wendy Robinson, Sandra Warren
OSM: Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Dianne Henning, Sandy Ordonez, Paul Orwig, Ryan Ozimek, Jacques Rentzke, Marijke Stuivenberg, Akarawuth Tamrareang, Altansukh Tumenjargal
PLT: Chris Davenport, Mark Dexter, Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Omar Ramos, Ron Severdia, Jean-Marie Simmonet, Andrea Tarr

Where we came from:

Mongolia

Australia

Thailand

France

The Netherlands

Germany

South Africa

Canada

Topics Covered and Action Items (where applicable) Created

The following is a brief summary of the topics discussed. Detailed reports will be published as they are produced.

Removal of the AGPL license from the Joomla Contributor Agreement (JCA)

It was unanimously voted to discontinue the AGPL license. This lessens restrictions and will open up the project to more contributors.
Restructuring

The Joomla Leadership, including the Open Source Matters board, Community Leadership Team, and Production Leadership team, recognize that our current leadership structure could be more effective. Communication between our teams and the community needs improvement, and oversight needs rethinking. As a team, we strive to be more effective leaders for the community. To achieve this, we have begun extensive discussions about the project’s leadership structure. This discussion is early and on-going. As we consider important changes to continue on a path towards more effectiveness, we intend to request community input and feedback to help us in this important effort.
Communications - External

The communications breakout discussion was one of the most lengthy. Audiences and current communications channels were identified - there are many! A review was made of the document produced by the current communications team this past spring, defining what is communications. Roles and responsibilities for the communications team moving forward were listed. Action items include: condensing the 12 newly defined roles into a more manageable list and begin identifying potential owners for these roles. Candidates must have a passion for communications and experience in the specific area (marketing, branding, graphics, etc).
Communications Internal

A working group will be started to bridge the gap when communication needs a boost between the community and the JUGs, the JED, events, merchandise and trademark. A comprehensive leadership directory wiki will be created for a better flow of leadership communication and troubleshooting. The communications team volunteers to disburse intra team communications, and facilitate intra team conflict resolution, including the creation of a FAQ list within the wiki for that purpose.
Internationalization

While English is the common language in the software world, the majority of the world population does not speak English. To increase Joomla’s presence in a proactive way and recruit more non-English-speaking volunteers, the following action items will be implemented: concentrating our efforts in the different regions of the world by identifying one or two community coordinators / contact persons in each region; compiling a list of currently active local communities and JUGs and see if there are any groups which have not yet been accounted for; identifying their needs, the nature of their communities, and recruiting translation help to update the Joomla info pages.
Roadmap and Goals

This discussion first explored the benefits of creating a public unified roadmap that encompasses the entire scope of the Joomla! project. After that, the discussion continued to define a process for creating a public unified roadmap that also includes periodic public progress updates from leadership.

The process for creating a public unified roadmap involves: Leadership defines and publishes an overall mission statement for the project. This is high level and conceptual.

Each leadership team defines and publishes their team’s mission statement, which should support the project’s overall mission. Each leadership team’s mission statement may need to be revised to insure that they all tie in well with the overall project mission statement. Each leadership team defines and publishes their annual goals which support their team’s mission statement. For each leadership team’s goals, the following supporting details will be added and published: milestones (achievement and target completion date); action items (each task required to progress toward achieving the milestone; resource(s): volunteer or paid workers, financial (specify the purpose and budget line item); features (if applicable), action items (if applicable), resources (if applicable). Each leadership team publishes periodic updates during the course of the year regarding their progress on each of their goals.
Volunteer Recruitment and Rentention

The PLT discussed forming a Joomla Outreach Project (JOP), where a "bucket" of tasks is created by teams, using the wiki. Community members would be invited to join these teams, and they would work in alignment with development goals, under the guidance of the PLT. Incentives (such as T-shirts) would be awarded upon the completion of each set of tasks.

Volunteer Now is a plan for recruiting new team members, because teams should be created to manage recurring, long-term tasks that require deeper knowledge. A volunteer engagement page will be created on the wiki, and a Volunteer Now button will link to it from the joomla.org home page. In the wiki a future volunteer will find documentation on how and why we build teams, and contacts for the projects major teams and assets.

A concept will be drafted listing outreach ideas for engaging university students.
Process Improvement

Regarding processes and messages in correspondence (for example, in areas of trademark, the JED and events), we often need more differentiation and adapted responses to specific situations.

Action items include: reviewing our texts to verify if we are using a friendly approach aimed at optimizing communication; listing and identifying situations and creating responses adapted to them; simplifying language.
Review Developer Sponsorship Program

We talked about the state of the Developer Sponsorship Program and how we handle the involvement of sponsored development time from companies and guide this process more effectively in the future. One Idea was to move from pre to post recognition and use a to-do list and let people pick from the “cookie jar” list to sponsor development time.

Action items include: speaking with the existing sponsors about their experience and writing a report; deciding if a money only approach or money and development time approach is best, finding a volunteer to manage the cookie jar.
Certification

A 1 - 2 plan of certification ideas and how to approach them will be drafted. Feedback from each leadership team will be gathered. The plan will include creating levels for web masters, designers and instructors of joomla, creating a curriculum and courses template for trainers, financial and licensing fees to create more revenue, a test database infrastructure.
Improving Recruitment of New Developers

A story we want to help tell is that Joomla can provide students with CS degrees experience on a global team that goes far beyond just a curriculum. Action items include creating a spreadsheet where we can determine which events developers are attending, and writing a one page messaging document outlining persuasive reasons why the Joomla Platform and CMS are useful for developers, and target university students.
Long Term Roadmap

We talked about the process for establishing goals and milestones for the Joomla project long term releases. Once every 6 months the PLT and developers will meet just before or after an existing event such as a Joomla Day or JandBeyond. We are hoping to do the first one this fall where milestones and goals for the July 2013 long term release will be discussed.

The entire leadership would like to thank eBay for the use of its offices for our summit, and Louis and Ron for coordinating with them. Thanks to Rochen we had tasty lunches, ordered with care by Wendy. And Gunner, our Summit Facilitator Extraordinaire kept us on target and on time!

For comments and feedback click here

Vote for the Version

ron.severdia@community.joomla.org (Ron Severdia) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 21:48:13 +0000

This is a report from the Joomla Leadership Summit now underway in San Jose, CA. Members of the Community Leadership Team (CLT), Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the board of Open Source Matters (OSM) are busy discussing the best foot forward in all areas of the project.

The PLT had our summit in the days leading up to the overall Leadership Summit. We'll share shortly the results of that summit, but we wanted to get some direct feedback from the community on an issue that affects many.

We decided to make a small change to the way Joomla versions are numbered. If you have read about the new development cycle, you know we now have a new Joomla version every six months and one long-term-support (LTS) release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 are six-month releases and the next release in January 2012 will be an LTS release. This way, users have a choice. They can get the latest and greatest version by updating with improvements every six months, or they can have a more stable feature set with updates every 18 months. Maintenance and security releases will be done as necessary for both LTS and STS releases during their support periods.

To try to make this as clear as possible to users, we have decided that the long-term releases will always be labeled as x.5 releases. For example, 3.0 and 3.1 will be regular, short-term six-month releases. The following version would be 3.5, indicating that it is a LTS release. Version 3.5 will be supported for 18 months. In the meantime, we will release 4.0 and 4.1. The LTS replacement for 3.5 will be 4.5, 18 months later.

We would like to present two options to the community to decide how to proceed with this versioning approach.

Click on the diagram above to view a larger version.

The first option (Option #1) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 1.8. The subsequent short -term releases would be 2.0 and 2.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 2.0.1 or 2.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 2.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because it would be the only version to not follow the x.5 numbering, but this version number would naturally follow 1.6 and 1.7.

The second option (Option #2) in the diagram is to call the January 2012 release (long-term release) 2.5. The subsequent short -term releases would be 3.0 and 3.1 (e.g. maintenance releases would be 3.0.1 or 3.1.1, etc.) and the following release would be 3.5 (using the x.5 number to identify it as a long-term release). This would be an anomaly in the versioning strategy because there would be no version numbers between 1.7 and 2.5, but this version number would follow the future versioning strategy (also there would be backwards compatibility with Joomla 1.5).

Vote for the option that makes the best sense here:

http://tinyurl.com/jversion

To comment on this post, visit http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1276-vote-for-the-version.html?groupid=714

Help Wanted for the Joomla! Events Team

Robert.Deutz@opensourcematters.org (Robert Deutz) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 15:28:40 +0000

Since the start of the Joomla! Project we have had an Events Team. This team created the Joomla!Day Charter and helped create the first of many Joomla!Days. Over time, the Joomla!Day organizers became more professional and the help of the Events Team was not as necessary.

Without a clear description of responsibilities or concept as to what this team should or can do, activities have reached a very low level: near zero, if we try to paraphrase it a little bit.

On the other hand, we have a lot of things in terms of events to do and to optimise. With this request for help I’ll try to fill the gaps.

JED Announces Support System

matt.lipscomb@community.joomla.org (Matt Lipscomb) — Mon, 30 May 2011 00:32:05 +0000

In March 2011 the JED hit 7000 listings. Now, half way to 8000, we are announcing a major change and improvement to the JED. It's my pleasure to introduce the JED Support System. With over a quarter million registered users in the JED, providing support is the primary use of volunteer time. In the latest blog, we outlined a few areas of improvements that we would be working on over the coming months. One of these areas was a new ticket support system. After nearly two years going back and forth between what we wanted for the teams, end users and management, we have come up with a solution that goes far beyond standard ticket support and includes a Knowledge Base, Announcement Panel, Download and Sample Repository, task calendaring, integration with Mosets Tree and ArtofUser and more!

The Joomla! Community Leadership Team is Growing!

wendy.robinson@forum.joomla.org (Wendy Robinson) — Fri, 27 May 2011 04:45:09 +0000

The Joomla! Community Leadership Team (CLT) is currently seeking new members to join us on our team and we want YOU, our fellow community members, to nominate those you feel would be well suited! (yes, you can nominate yourself as well ;) )

If you’ve been around Joomla for a long time then you’re likely already aware of what the CLT is, what we do and how we fit into the project structure. If that’s the case, feel free to skip to the bottom for the nomination details.

For those of you who don’t know or who aren’t 100% sure, we’ve listed some details here to help outline the whole picture.

What is the CLT?

There is a large working group within the project called the Community Workgroup (CWG) under which certain sites/areas fall. Those areas are Joomla User Groups (JUGs), the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED), the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD), the Joomla Community Magazine (JCM), the Joomla People Site, the Joomla Community Forums, the Joomla! Community Portal, the Vulnerable Extensions List (VEL) and Joomla.org main site. Hundreds of volunteers make up the teams that manage those areas. The Community Leadership Team, CLT, is the leadership arm of the project responsible for the Community Workgroup , CWG as a whole.

What does the CLT do?

Our CLT roles in the Community Workgroup includes recruiting new volunteers, working with the teams on daily tasks, adding necessary features to the various directories and sites, helping the teams roll out new sites when ready, as well as the overall responsibility of ensuring a healthy atmosphere for all contributors. We also communicate on a regular basis with one another, members of our teams, community members and our fellow teams the leadership group - the Production Leadership Team (PLT) and the Open Source Matters board (OSM).

In addition to our roles within teams, the CLT is also responsible for the organization and upkeep of the various sites in the Joomla.org family. This includes duties such as software updates, security monitoring, feature updates and overall site management.

There are also a number of administrative and communicative responsibilities where we could use some additional help such as blogging, keeping the community updated and involved in our news and decisions, community outreach and evangelism, scheduled and recorded meetings, publishing of meeting minutes and outcomes, managing our People site group, and utilizing other social media areas such as Twitter, facebook and YouTube.

We also want make a larger effort towards internationalization of the sites and communication between various regional and international communities and joomla.org.

Who is the CLT looking for?

So as you can see, the CLT has a lot on its plate and we could really use some new, fresh faces and ideas and experience to help us with these tasks, reach goals and move the Community Workgroup forward.

We’re looking for people with the following skills and abilities:

In General:

comfortable working with people of different backgrounds - be they cultural, professional or any other
Somebody who can work well on their own but also contribute to combined goals as a member of a team
Demonstrate problem solving abilities
Ability to handle controversial situations
Some experience working/volunteering for an open source software project, preferably Joomla, though experience that can be shared from other projects is certainly welcome
General conduct of a professional and considerate nature on Joomla.org as well as other sites and media channels
Must have a reasonable and consistent amount of time to focus on your leadership responsibilities each week.
Must be willing to read and agree to abide by the Joomla Code of Conduct

Some specific skills that would be an asset to the CLT:

Good administrative skills - Not necessarily due to professional experience, but if you’re an organizer, planner, get-stuff-done kind of person then let us know
Management skills - whether in business or volunteer roles, if you’ve been a leader in the past, we’d love to know more about you
International community members with English as a first or second language
Writing/blogging/communication skills with a general interest in that area.
An interest in, and aptitude for making use of, social media channels of communication: twitter, facebook, youTube, etc

So if you or someone you know fits any combination of the above criteria and would like to be a part of Joomla’s Community Leadership Team, please send us an email with a name, some information about your nominee and why you think they would be a good fit, and a preferred email address and/or Skype or GTalk details for contact.

We will be welcoming nominations from today through Friday, June 10, 2011. The current members of the CLT will be reviewing and considering all nominations from which we will select and contact those we feel would be the best fit to join. You can send your email to nominate@community.joomla.org Please be sure to include “CLT Nomination” in your email title.

Joint Leadership Summit Goals

alice.grevet@opensourcematters.org (Alice Grevet) — Thu, 26 May 2011 23:24:34 +0000

In preparation for the Joint Summit (CLT, PLT, OSM) sheduled for July 29 - 31, 2011, at eBay in San Jose, California, the Joint Summit Committee has compiled a list of proposed goals for discussion at the three day meeting. The list below is shared with the community for feedback before finalizing the meeting agenda.

The goals include planning and discussing the following topics (not presented in any particular order):

Who are we building Joomla for? Who is our target audience and thus who should we build new features for?
Better collaboration
The future of the Project
The Joomla Project common goals
The Joomla Project strategy
Evaluate our project structure
- The future role, if any, of the Community Oversight Committee
- Better understand how our teams function
Talk about processes (conflict resolution, budget process, ….)
How to attract more developers?
Review Sponsored Development program
Review our Mission, Vision and Values
Collaboration strategy with international communities
Joomla! World Conference 2012 - Setup a committee, define goals

To comment on this list of goals please visit: http://people.joomla.org/groups/viewdiscussion/1220-Joint+Leadership+Summit+Goals.html?groupid=714