The Joomla! Community Portal ™

The final part of the 2012 goal setting/budget planning process suggests that each leadership team publish quarterly updates on progress for each of their major goals. Following through on this part of the process is important-it promotes increased openness and transparency, it strengthens accountability and trust between the project's leadership and the community, and it recognizes the volunteer contributors who are the most important resource for our project's continued growth and success.

This post gives a summary of progress that was made during the fourth quarter for Open Source Matters' (OSM) four major 2012 goals, along with the names of key contributors for each of the items. Sincerest thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the progress that was made on these goals during the fourth quarter!

Here are blogs summarizing OSM quarterly goal updates from earlier this year:

• First Quarter 2012 OSM Goals Updates
• Second Quarter 2012 OSM Goals Updates
• Third Quarter 2012 OSM Goals Updates

OSM will publish updates for our 2013 goals. Look for another blog with our First Quarter 2013 updates to hopefully be published by early May 2013.

Simplify Trademark rules and team processes

• The board commissioned, and received a Trademark policy review proposal that has as it’s aims:
  • To allow proper community use, while preventing abuse or fraudulent use.
  • Keep control of the mark, and retain discretion to end or stop offending use.
  • Shorten the time-frame for trademark decision-making.
  • Increase uniformity of access to the trademark, while reducing resources devoted to trademarks, both for OSM and the community.
• At the board summit meeting, before the Joomla! World Conference in San Jose, the board discussed the proposal.

Reduce communication channels and improve public facing communications processes

• At the board meeting in San Jose in November, Dianne Henning, Sandy Ordonez and Alice Grevet committed to working together to help move communications along in 2013.

  They have begun preliminary discussions on ideas that include:

  • Create a curated blog/portal with project information targeting news/media groups and those not acquainted with Joomla
  • Create a curated blog/portal with project information targeting the initiated Joomla community
  • Create a beginner's roadmap to help community members find information and become involved
• As soon as the joint leadership goals are approved in early 2013, these members look forward to working with members of CLT and PLT in a working group to bring these ideas, or similar ones, to fruition in a common vision that helps all teams meet their communications goals.
• Public Relation Initiatives (Sandra Ordonez)
  
  • Drafted and distributed 36 million downloads release and conducted media relations
  • Secured interview with Rob Mitchell of Computerworld regarding Joomla! Users, Jack Germain of ECT News Network, and CMS Wire.
  • Reached out to major publication regarding a negative story about earlier versions of Joomla, and drafted statement used to help counter it.

Research and implement plan to increase sponsorship income by $20,000 from 2011

• Reached agreements with two Global Platinum Sponsors (Mike Carson, Paul Orwig)
• Capital Committee team development was initiated and 4 members were added with plans to add additional persons in the 1st quarter of 2013.
• Planning stages of a new sponsors and partners website was initiated for a development and release date of the end of the first quarter of 2013.

Launch first Joomla! World Conference and improve support for Joomla! Days

• Joomla World Conference took place November 16-18 (JWC team)

Work on other OSM led initiatives

While the primary focus for this blog is on progress made during the fourth quarter on OSM's four major 2012 goals, work has also been underway on a number of other important OSM led initiatives. Here is a list of some of these other initiatives, along with the OSM board members who worked on them during the first quarter:

• Moving forward on plans for Joomla certification program (Leonel Canton, Ofer Cohen, Sarah Watz)
• Expand focus of new OSM Project Manager role (Ofer Cohen)
• Work on transition of Joomla shop to OSM Capital team (Dianne Henning).
• Improve multi-language support for Joomla software and OSM website (Marijke Stuivenberg, Jacques Rentzke, Radek Suski).
• Improve support for different aspects of internationalization (Marijke Stuivenberg, Javier Gomez, Paulo Griiettner).
• Coordinate improvements to the free demo program (Marijke Stuivenberg).

Please join the OSM Fourth Quarter 2012 Goal Updates discussion and share your questions and comments.