By Cyril Reze on 2026-02-18 16:06 in Marketing Team

Date: February 11th, 2026 - 18:00-19:00 UTC
Attendees: Cyril Rezé, Emmanuel Lemor, Mike Kritzer, Nadja Lamisch

Topics & Highlights

POST JWC 2026 Marketing Plan Presentation

The meeting opened with brief greetings and acknowledgements of contributors to the Marketing plan and presentation work, including thanks to Mike and Cyril for their effort. Participants exchanged appreciation and set a positive tone before substantive discussion began.

• Marketing Plan
  • The team praised the marketing plan and continued the discussion.
  • One of the points was about the sponsorship, sponsorship packages and contacting relevant sponsors, agencies and developers.
• Post presentation ideas
  • There were some ideas for in-person-only benefits.
  • The marketing team will develop a list.
  • There have been other ideas for promotion and marketing too (like community-story videos, book signings...)
• Questions/talking points (for 2026 and beyond)
  • Why is delivering a virtual option so labor-intensive and what roles are required for it?
  • The group identified a significant workload and cost to build an interactive virtual platform that preserves community spirit.
  • Recruiting volunteers to staff virtual rooms in exchange for conference access was suggested as a staffing model for the virtual experience.
  • The core disagreement was whether to offer multiple virtual ticket tiers and regionally adjusted pricing to broaden access.
• The leads to consider
  • The team wants to do special sponsorships for extension developers.
  • Mike recommended Virtual “developer rooms” or Ask‑Anything spaces to increase accessibility and engagement during the conference.
  • The team agreed to the ticket proposal from Cyril (launching physical early-bird sales and reassessing three to six months before the conference to decide on virtual options). Nadja proposed to discuss it in the JWC team.
  • There was a discussion about how to attract more and younger people to get more "new blood".
  • Mike proposed to pay more attention to inclusivity.
• Personal remarks and connections
  • Participants exchanged brief personal comments and memories about meeting extension developers at past conferences, establishing rapport and prior contacts relevant to sponsorship outreach. The segment included short interjections and confirmations of mutual acquaintances among attendees.

 

Open Source Pledge concept and employer pledge idea

Emmanuel presented the Open Source Pledge model that asks companies to sponsor individual maintainers annually (e.g., $2,000) and an employer pledge to allow paid work time for open source contributions, as ways to support volunteer maintainers financially and structurally. The idea was framed as a mechanism to rebalance funding toward small, single‑maintainer projects.

The Open Source Pledge model was proposed as a way to secure recurring corporate sponsorship for individual OSS maintainers.

 

Recap PBF 2026 1st Edition

Special thanks were given to Josean Telleria for his graphic and animation work on the first Pizza, Bugs & Fun of 2026.

In total:

• 10 graphic visuals were created by Josean
• 5 videos were edited by Cyril, with an animated introduction by Josean.

It was discussed that a recap meeting had been organized by the PBF team, which Cyril attended. The event received a positive assessment. There was also a strong motivation to begin preparing the next edition (August 2026) now, allowing more time to design visual communications and develop a better marketing strategy for the event. The idea of ​​slightly modifying the name to a more universal one was raised (the word "bugs" could limit the event's scope, making it more accessible not only to developers but also to documentation writers, translators, and end users, regardless of their level of expertise).

 

Next Steps

After these 2 consecutive meetings, for more than 2 hours of productive and enriching discussions, the people present were all very hungry (especially Emmanuel and Cyril, Nadja having planned ahead by having dinner before the meetings, and Mike being at breakfast).

However, here are the next steps following this meeting:

• Update the marketing plan for the JWC and align it with the constraints and directions taken.
• Create a private channel for JWC 2026 marketing, common to the JWC team organizers and the marketing team members.
• Begin preparations for the second edition of the PBF in 2026 as early as March.
• Conduct a thorough assessment of sponsorships with Joomla! and Joomla events, and study the measures to be implemented to increase Joomla's appeal to sponsors. Provide attractive value and ROI for sponsors.