By Luca Marzo on 2024-01-02 18:24 in Board of Directors

Open Source Matters, Inc.
Semi-Annual Members Meeting

Date: December 14, 2023
Time: 18:00 UTC
Total time of meeting: 1 hour and 35 minutes

Attendees:

Board Representatives: Crystal Dionysopoulos (President), Philip Walton (Vice President), Luca Marzo (Secretary), Nadja Lamisch (Treasurer), Louise Hawkins (Director), Sigrid Gramlinger (Director).

Members:
Jennifer Gress, Martin Kopp, Anja de Crom, Richard Fath, Dieter Ziller, Christiane Maier-Stadtherr, Giovanni Genovino, Tom van der Laan, Shirielle Williams, Mike Kritzer, Alireza Javaherian, Alison Meeks, Llewellyn van der Merwe, Davide Messia, Maria Skampoura.

Discussion outline

• Luca introduced the meeting, sharing the instructions to maximize interaction among attendees.

• Crystal welcomed participants to the meeting.

• Crystal presented the collaboration initiative held with other Open Source CMS in relation to the Cyber Resilience Act.

• Crystal introduced the new Advisory Board, presenting Maria Skampoura, a member of the Advisory Board of Open Source Matters, who attended the Semi-Annual Meeting.

• Crystal thanked the community for the amazing work done on Joomla 5.

• Nadja presented the budget status of the project for the last 6 months. Books are current and reconciled more frequently than in the past.

• Nadja informed the community about the removal of Veem as payment processor. This was part of a simplification of processes and cost optimization.

• Maria Skampoura requested the reasons why financial statements were not published anymore on the corporate website. Luca and Philip explained the reasons and the Board will consider the opportunity to restart publishing the financial statements on a regular basis.

• Crystal shared some ideas on how to improve the communication from the leadership towards the community and asked the attendees to share their feelings and improvement ideas. 

• Maria Skampoura and Jennifer Gress suggested adopting some regular reports regarding the financial status and progress of the activities. Richard Fath suggested adopting at least a status report on a yearly basis, pointing out the need to spread information about leadership decisions on the software strategy and evolution. Luca shared his opinion on the lack of usefulness of the current director reporting way. Crystal proposed to enlarge the scope of the President report to become the Organizational Report. 

• Crystal presented the Cultural Improvement Project which the leadership is starting to improve the contributing environment for Joomlers. This project is supported by the whole leadership and will directly involve several community members, through workshops and other activities.

• Crystal shared some updates on how travel expenses and reimbursements will be processed, to simplify and speed up the procedure by using a dedicated software for that, which improves participation, auditability and includes authorization levels.

• Joomla will participate at FOSDEM in February 2024.

• Philip presented the Joomla Academy idea with focus on code and documentation. An article has been published on the Community Magazine to explain how it will work.

• Crystal recalled the upcoming elections for Group 2, inviting volunteers to apply.

• Maria conducted a research about the interest in Joomla and found out that some channels where people ask support and questions about Joomla are unmonitored or unanswered, like Stackoverflow. Philip shared that there is one community member very active on the Joomla Stackoverflow. Richard highlighted that many volunteers can’t afford doing other tasks due to the workload they already have in different teams and capacities. Dieter Ziller shared his perspective on the improvements needed in the onboarding process for new volunteers, bringing the example of newcomers to the Joomla Documentation.

• Richard requested information about which channels will be included in the Cultural Improvement Project, whether Mattermost, GitHub, Forum and the social channels are monitored or not. 

• Laura Gordon shared the invitation for the Joomla User Group Leaders Meeting which will be held on January 22, 2024 at 16.00 UTC.

• Dieter requested whether the Terms of Service and Policies documents related to the Joomla Documentation are still valid. Luca confirmed the validity of the English version of such documents. 

• Nicola Galgano requested in which regions the project plans to find new volunteers. Louise talked about the opportunities offered by Africa and Asia, but also to increase our reach in Europe countries like France. Furthermore Crystal highlighted how the Cultural Improvement Project is meant to increase retention of volunteers and provide a safer environment for every volunteer. There are some initiatives ran by several volunteers to reach out to students in Universities and Schools

• Maria proposed to adopt Artificial Intelligence to improve the onboarding processes, to simplify the experience of new volunteers.

The meeting has been adjourned at 19:35 UTC.