By Luca Marzo on 2021-01-23 14:00 in Board of Directors

Open Source Matters, Inc.
Semi-Annual Members Meeting

Date: January 21, 2021
Time: 18:30 UTC
Total time of meeting: 1 hour 5 minutes

Attendees:

Brian Mitchell (President), Justine Aybeale Abunyanga (Vice President), Luca Marzo (Secretary), Radek Suski (Treasurer), Jaz Parkyn (Director), Marco Dings (Director), Hugh Douglas-Smith (Director), David Opati Aswani (Director), Wilco Alsemgeest (Director), Marianela Queme (Director), Chris Keen, Anja de Crom, Laura Gordon, Richard Fath, Philip Walton, Jennifer Gress, Davide Messia, Viviana Menzel, Niels Braczek, Llewellyn van der Merwe, Sigrid Gramlinger, Alison Meeks, Brian Ronnow, Christiane Maier-Stadtherr, Hans van der Meer, Shivam Rajput, Stefan Wendhausen, Ahmad Moussa, Giovanni Genovino, Sander Potjer, Nicola Galgano, Sebastien Lapoux, Harald Leithner.

Discussion outline

Introduction

Speaker: Luca Marzo (Secretary)

• Luca welcomed all the participants and shared the instructions to properly attend the meeting.

Semi-Annual Report from the President

Speaker: Brian Mitchell (President)

• Brian welcomed everyone to the meeting.

• Brian thanked Jennifer Gress and Luca Marzo for the incredible effort on the revision process of the bylaws. They bring a perfect blend of institutional history/knowledge and a vision for how we can handle things better in the future.

• Congratulations to Dries Buytaert and the entire Drupal community. Twenty years is a great accomplishment!

• Brian remembered about the Group 2 elections currently ongoing and encouraged any member to submit their manifesto if they want to run for any of the positions up for election. Call for Candidate Manifestos - Group 2 (2021) - Elections 

• Brian highlighted four areas for improvement throughout the Project:

  • Conflict Resolution - improving communication, mediation and conflict prevention. Thanks to Elisa Foltyn and Justine Ayebale Abunyanga for providing initial leadership on how to address that.

  • Support for the Marketing Department, especially with Joomla 4 approaching the release phase.

  • Long term planning, budgeting and visioning, to give a more stable outlook to the Project.

  • Joomla 3 has been an amazing journey, Joomla 4 is on the horizon. How do we see the future, and Joomla 5?

Questions & Comments

• Jennifer Gress asked whether the outcome of the work done by Elisa and Justine will be shared. Brian shared that the work is still ongoing and the results will be shared once completed.

• Anja de Crom asked if there is the need to form a Joomla 5 strategy working group. Niels Braczek pointed out that the Software Strategy & Architecture Team is there for such purpose.

Legal & Finance Department

Speaker: Hugh Douglas-Smith (Director)

• Hugh announced the recent Platinum Sponsor, Scala Hosting. 

• Hugh recognised our long term hosting partner Rochen who has provided the full suite of hosting for the Joomla project since pretty much the outset. Their provision is worth a significant amount to us as a project and is very greatly appreciated.

• Finally, Hugh wanted to reach out and thank our newest partner, Google. Google has contributed sponsorship to the project and will be providing further resources as part of their project of making the web more accessible. This marries very well with our work in Joomla 4 for better accessibility.

• Joomla relies on all of our sponsors to enable us to continue and I want to take this opportunity to thank each and everyone of them for their support and assistance.

Marketing & Communications Department

Speaker: Marianela Quemé (Director)

• Special thanks to all the members of the marketing team who have never stopped working regardless of hardships or great days.

• The Instagram Giveaway campaign was launched last year.

• Google Adwords campaign, was started but stopped due to funds.

• Joomla 4 landing page for promoting Joomla 4 was commissioned to the Production Department so it could be created hand in hand.

• Joomla 4 team has continued to work to finish items related to promoting Joomla 4 when it launches.

• Social media team’s endless dedication to post in the social media channels about everything related to Joomla including thank you notes to sponsors.

• We need better communication with all teams.

• There is a great need for a new Marketing Team leader.

• We need to reactivate inactive teams, and continue to build campaigns that will market Joomla to the world.

Questions & Comments

• Anja de Crom shared concerns from the Community about Joomla market share. Marianela reminded the need of a strong Marketing Team to change the decreasing trend and increase our numbers.

• Philp Walton highlighted the presence of the Community that can be engaged and involved as a marketing arm through awards, polls, articles to comment, to help market the product.

• Wilco Alsemgeest asked if there will be a blog post about the “target group” of users identified for Joomla. Marianela confirmed that the blog post will be published once the work on the topic will be completed.

Programs Department

Speaker: Jaz Parkyn (Director)

• Joomla Certification Program - the team is continuing the work on the migration to Shika LMS, that will replace Moodle as exam platform, this activity should be completed by the end of Q1 2021. During the year the team aims to provide a last update to the Joomla 3.x Administrator Exam, aligned with the latest updates of the Joomla 3.x series of the CMS and to provide the brand new Joomla 4 Administrator Exam that should be delivered roughly 6 months after J4 is released.

• Volunteers Engagement Team - VET will continue the work started in 2020 on the three R's (Recruitment, Retention and Recognition). The first goal for the team is to establish a proper workflow to handle the recruitment of new volunteers and their onboarding, with particular attention to onboarding pathways from specific "programs" like Pizza Bugs and Fun, GSoC and the local Joomla Users Groups. Some activities have started to analyze the reasons why the organization is not able to retain all the volunteers, the team developed also an "Exit interview" that is going to be implemented when volunteers leave teams or the project as such.

• Education Outreach Working Group - The working group defined its mission and motto during 2020 and is going into the implementation phase in 2021. Their motto is "Entice, Engage and Educate" and reflects the mission that was adopted: be a hub of teaching tools and resources for those who want to teach and learn Joomla around the world. The group is actively collecting materials and information from participants who held classes related to Joomla, aiming to prepare a curriculum to propose Joomla in classes for several education paths (schools, universities, continuing education for adults).

• All of the department teams are holding monthly meetings - minutes of these meetings are regularly published on the Volunteer Portal.

Operations Department

Speaker: Wilco Alsemgeest (Director)

• A lot of other great things have been done within the department, the teams, together with other volunteers within the community. Most (if not all) are written in the various reports, blog posts, magazine articles and other places. I will mention a few.

• The Community Magazine Team has done a great job, after the hard work by Rowan to migrate the old site and data into a new one. With the great help of StackIdeas (Mark Lee and his team) for the design. Andrea and Luca (of course the other members) started the first issue in March 2020. What an outstanding job they all did, the JCM is rocking again.
  https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/joomla-community-magazine-team

• All members of the webmasters team have spent a lot of their valuable time to create structure, define procedures and policies and most importantly an stable environment to work in, but also for our systems.
  There is too much done to name every single thing (it's all in the reports), the results are great, unnecessary systems are gone, old systems are replaced or upgraded, security has been increased, processes have been standardized and made the same in all relevant parts.
  Check the department reports: https://volunteers.joomla.org/departments/operations and the Webmaster team reports: https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams/webmasters-team 

• A painful point in the last year was the "Joomla Resource Directory" breach, members of the community did their best to build a new solution within the central Community website. The transition has definitionally be bumpy, there are probably enough improvements to be made. We have been able to create a new starting point for all companies providing Joomla Services and users to find these companies.

Production Department

Speaker: Marco Dings (Director)

• Since the last half year meeting significant progress has been made in maintaining the three release branches 3.9x, 3.10 and 4.0, and many thanks to everybody that contributed.

• The 3.10 branch will serve as a springboard in the migration to the upcoming 4.0 release, extensions running under 3.10 should run under 4.0, making for an easier migration. As for 4.0 we have now reached the 6th beta and the original intention was to move to a release candidate. However the beta release of Bootstrap 5 sparked an ongoing discussion to use Bootstrap 5 instead of Bootstrap 4. This is a multi faceted discussion and Production will provide a blog post with the considerations once a decision is reached.

• Joomla 4 will be a significant step forward in serving the designated market of middle to large companies and governments whilst not abandoning smaller companies.

• From a user perspective Joomla 4 will be better tailored to content creators with o.a.the ability to directly create menu items from content, a significantly improved media manager, workflow and accessibility. Developers can look forward to a command line interface, a REST web based API, email templates, plugins for workflow and media manager. The above is not meant to be a comprehensive list, for more details check the beta announcements.

• Looking beyond Joomla 4 we plan to deliver timeboxed releases (details to be found on joomla.org posts). To allow tor joomlers to better suggest and participate, we have introduced an RFC process where everybody can make proposals which are then discussed and potentially put on the roadmap.

• As for the detailed activities of the Production Department please check the departments volunteer portal for the bi-weekly reports.

Questions & Comments

• Public acknowledgment and thanks to Harald Leithner for being Release Lead for the 3.x series for such a long time. Also massive thanks to George Wilson for his long term leadership on Joomla 4.

The meeting has been adjourned at 19.35 UTC.