Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, published an article entitled The Role of Consumers Within an Open Source Community in this month's Open Source Business Resource.

Users are the target audience for GNOME. The GNOME Project's goal is universal access. Making sure technology is available to anyone, not just technical people, regardless of culture, financial well-being or physical ability is what GNOME is all about. The fact that people use it makes the project a success, the developers happy, and the whole thing going.

In this article, Stormy points out the importance of understanding the needs of consumers when building software and the challenge inherent in synthesizing the viewpoints and perspectives of 14 million users of GNOME technologies and software.

To begin, end users are not often involved in the project. Some reasons for low involvement signal project success, for example, when technology is very easy to work with, little assistance is required. In other cases, cultural issues might limit involvement, for example, when those less technical feel intimidated interacting with developers.

Regardless of the reasons, Stormy reminds of the importance for open source projects to consider how to best improve opportunities available for consumers to participate and lists great ways for users to get involved. By making it easier for users to participate, we enable interaction between those who need technology with those who make it possible. And, of course, that should lead to better technology.

Stormy Peters is an experienced, respected member of the open source community and I urge you to read this article and consider how we can continue to build a more welcoming environment for users to contribute to the Joomla! project.

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