After three long days at the Joomla Leadership Summit, a team of eleven Open Source Matters members from four continents met in San Jose, California for our annual summit. Yes, much pizza was eaten. No, we didn’t spend too much time swimming in the hotel pool. Instead, we worked hard through seven sessions to pack as much Joomla goodness into two days as possible. We recognized that we couldn’t solve all our challenges in this short period, so we created small groups and focused on action items to help build momentum and progress.

Your OSM team, from left-to-right: Akarawuth Tamrareang, Thomas Hampton, Marijke Stuivenberg, Ryan Ozimek, Altansukh Tumenjargal, Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Jacques Rentzke, Sandy Ordonez, Paul Orwig, Dianne Henning

Now, for your viewing pleasure, here’s our report-back to the community.

Outlining Process Gaps

While we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, we’re always looking for opportunities to better serve the project. To understand where we can improve, we spent time outlining a few key areas of operations, and then highlighted documentation needs for each. By documenting our efforts, we’ll be able to better pull key performance indicators, thereby informing our board of success levels. We plan to document our work in the project’s wiki for higher levels of transparency and accountability to the community.

While the number of tasks are too long to list in this article, the three key areas that we tackled in this session included:

• Individual roles and responsibilities that require further documentation
• Team roles and responsibilities that require further documentation, or creation
• Workflow processes that can be optimized or automated

Trademark

We discussed the areas that need improvement, including:

• Multiple sets of rules and forms to complete create confusion
• Challenges exist in completing the Trademark application process
• The need for revising language used in rules and in email replies
• The lack of clear roles and responsibilities for team members
• Workflow between teams (JUGS, Events, JED)

Some of the action items include:

• Reviewing the text and forms used
• Create pages (stories) that are specific to groups of Trademark users. (JUGs, Joomla!Day organizers, businesses, journalists, fans/supporters)

Capital Committee

Existing sponsors will be reviewed and interviews conducted to ensure that developer sponsorship is utilized properly. While seeking more ways to raise funds for the project, the Committee will focus on documenting and streamlining current processes for new sponsor engagement. The main goals for the Capital Committee will be to:

• complete a spreadsheet for current sponsor and contact information
• document sponsor engagement processes and develop e-mail templates for consistent communication
• revisit all sponsorship and support-related pages on Joomla.org and OSM pages to ensure a clear path for potential sponsors and financial supporters
• design a Joomla site statistics page and enable links for potential sponsors to evaluate web traffic
• engage in active discussions with appropriate Leadership teams for better utilization of various Joomla.org sections to bring targeted links for sponsors in terms of premium listings, image banners, individual supporter group lists and sponsored articles
• encourage human resource sponsorship when interacting with existing and/or potential sponsors
• liaison with Finance team to keep annual budget implementation in check

Events

The new Events Team is in the process of being organized. In the end around 22 people volunteered to join the team. Next steps are contacting the people and finalizing the team.

In 2012 we are planning two major events with a 6 month gap between them. One of them will most likely be in Europe and one in North America. Both events are targeted for 300 people. A more detailed concept will be posted to the public leadership list soon.

Finance

These are the main goals for the Treasurer team:

• Train/support Thomas Hampton as new Assistant Treasurer
• Define OSM key performance indicators
• Improve documentation of Treasurer team tasks
• Create roles and responsibility documents for Budget Committee and Audit Committee
• Define and/or enhance processes that have a financial impact
• Improve coordination with Capitol Committee to hand off potential sponsor contacts
• Provide a mid-year budget update
• Implement enhanced 2012 goal setting and budget process

Certification

Joomla Web administrators are highly needed in the marketplace today.  We've begun investigating ways in which we can support the growth of qualified Joomla administrators around the world, one of which would be through a potential certification program.  With a certification program, employers could have more confidence in investing in a Joomla-based website.  We're very early in the learning process, so we're looking forward to collect more information to see if it's an opportunity worth following up further.

• Draft of brainstormed ideas for a certification program
• Outline of potential partners
• Depending on feedback, creation of an action plan

Communications

The Communications Team will oversee the following action items:

• Create a list of community members and J! developers worldwide who could respond to reporter inquiries in their language
• Manage OSM website redesign
• Establish an external emergency communications team
• Plan a press relations training event for Joomla leaders
• Outline roles and responsibilities for Marketing lead
• Create a space on community wiki for communications team collaboration
• Create a global press list and PR kit

Parting Thoughts

We’re eager to move forward on our action items, and we feel good about our two days together.  These notes represent an overview of our discussions, but we'll be diving deep into acting on these immediately.  There’s much work to be done, but we’re ready to take on the challenge. Thank you for your support and volunteer efforts!