One of the agreements reached at the May 2012 leadership summit was to form an overall project goals and strategy working group. This working group includes members from each of Joomla's leadership teams: Chris Davenport (Production Leadership Team), Olaf Offick (Community Leadership Team), and Paul Orwig (Open Source Matters).

The purpose of this new working group is to work with the project's leadership and help define a three year vision statement for the project along with a set of one year overall project goals, and then to support the formation of working groups that will work on the different overall project goals.

A new step: Three year vision statement

The three year vision statement sets a high level objective and overall direction for the project. It is intended to help keep our major work efforts aligned, to point the way toward some overall goals, and to suggest the way to proceed when issues come up that might prove difficult to resolve.

This has been adopted as our project's three year vision statement:

Increase adoption of the CMS and Framework.

Another new step: one year overall project goals

For this year as well as the previous two years, each of Joomla's leadership teams have defined a separate set of goals for their individual teams. Adding a set of overall project goals is a new step for 2013. This new step is not intended to replace or supercede any of those individual team level goals. Instead, adding overall project goals reflects the fact that some important work areas have an impact on many different parts of the project. It is hoped that defining a set of overall project goals will encourage better coordination and improved collaboration between Joomla's leadership teams so that the best results can be achieved for our project and our community.

It is important to keep in mind that progress on any of these overall project goals (along with everything else in Joomla) primarily depends on the contributions from volunteers in our community. Because of that, accomplishing these goals may take longer than one year to complete. Also, some of these overall goals may actually be ongoing work efforts.

These have been adopted as our project's overall goals for 2013:

• Create a Joomla "app store" that will allow users to search for and install extensions directly from the backend administrator interface
• Simplify and streamline our project's communication channels
• Improve documentation for end users and developers
• Make it easier for new developers to get involved
• Improve multi-language support on joomla.org
• Launch a certification program for different Joomla skill areas
• Improve our understanding of our users

Next steps

Work on some of these overall goals has already begun, and in those cases some working groups have already been formed or are in the process of being formed. In other cases new working groups may be formed. Expect more announcements regarding the formation of new working groups to focus on some of these overall project goals, as well as information about how you can get involved if you are interested to help in any of those areas.

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