The Joomla! Community Portal ™

Thanks to everyone who provided constructive feedback in response to the "Better Communication With the Joomla Community" blog post.

We asked for your thoughts on two questions:

1. Which decisions made by the Joomla team are important enough to undergo community consultation?
2. What communication steps should all these decisions go through?

A Summary of Your Feedback on Question 1

This was definitely the toughest question. People understood that a lot of smaller decisions need to made without consulting the community. However, they also acknowledged that deciding where to draw the line between these smaller decisions and more important decisions wasn't easy. Here are some suggestions that you made:

• Financial: Does a decision involve more than a certain percentage of project income or more than a fixed dollar amount?
• Community: Does a decision affect a large number of the people in the community?
• Project: Does a decision modify the project's organization or goals in a major way?
• Legal: Are the project by-laws being altered?

A Summary of Your Feedback on Question 2

Most of you thought that question 2 was much easier to answer than question 1. We had originally suggested four public phases to each decision-making process:

• Step 1: Explanation of the question and request for feedback
• Step 2: Feedback results
• Step 3: Decision
• Step 4: Implementation

Many people said they saw no reason to modify this process. Here are some of the changes that were suggested:

• Have more phases for the most important decisions and fewer phases for less important decisions.
• Set a standard timeline for Step 1 so that people know how long they have to reply.

What Happens Now

We're going to follow the four phases outlined above. We'll work on a draft communication policy and post back here for comment as soon as it's complete.