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OSM Nomination and Election Process
19.11.10
The following draft text has been drawn up in order to clarify and further define the nomination and election process to OSM board positions. We invite you to submit your feedback via the Joomla! People site link at the bottom. Thank you! 
Elections: Two calendar periods are generally planned for elections each year: April and October. Exceptions can be made if the board vitally needs specific skills (for example, if the Treasurer leaves).
Number of Board members: The recommended number of board members to carry out the responsibilities of OSM is 13. This number may fluctuate up to 15 or down to 11.
Term Limits: All future board appointments will be for one 2-year period with exceptions possible if the board vitally needs specific skills (Treasurer, Legal Council).
Selection Criteria:
- Community: nominees should have a strong track record of successfully collaborating with, enabling others, and earning the respect of the Joomla! community.
- Character: nominees should have demonstrated integrity, with a history of acting honestly, fairly and openly when in leadership roles.
- Experience and Expertise: nominees being proposed for specific roles should have strong experience and expertise in those areas.
- Success: nominees should be able to point to a history of success and leaving previous roles in a better state than when they arrived.
- Diversity: our goal is to work toward, and honor gender and cultural diversity. We are committed to seeking nominations from all talented and dedicated members of our international Joomla! community.
Election Procedure:
- Public nominations open on the 1st of the month and close on the 14th. Nominations must be made with the agreement of the nominee.
- The OSM board examines the candidates and suggests names to the Community Oversight Committee (COC) before the end of the month.
- The COC approval takes 10 business days to approve or reject the names.
- OSM contacts the successful and unsuccessful nominees. 
Click here for discussion and feedback on the Joomla! People site.
Part of a series of articles highlighting new features in Joomla 1.6. The Media Manager is a longstanding feature in Joomla. It came over from the Mambo days. Between Joomla 1.0 and 1.5, not many changes were made to the Media Manager. Along the way, the Media Manager even lost functionality, when it lost the ability to upload multiple images at once. Fortunately, the Media Manager has been granted a bit of love in Joomla 1.6. Let's take a look at some of the new features you can expect to find.
Everyone needs to do SEO, its a continual point I make when speaking at Joomla events. Even if you are a local school, parents will first use Google to find information, they won't come directly to your site.
Our second Video Raw Review is on a useful SEO extensions called iJoomla SEO. Its a very useful tool to help you organize and manage you SEO efforts.
I installed iJoomla SEO and put it through it's paces without ever having used it before. Raw look, no reading documentation, just install it and play!
Be sure to read a full description of SecureJoomla on in our Joomla Extensions and Components store.
Once in a while a product for Joomla comes along and really makes me sit up and pay attention. One such recent product was a new Joomla security component called SecureLive. A simple module that you can install on your site and immediately secure Joomla more effectively.
Now, I'll admit to not knowing much about the hard core details of server and Joo[...]
On the new Joomla Developers Blog you can read more about the coding efforts and more on the new Joomla version 1.6, what will you find there and more information read here...
Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com
Looking at the latest Release Candidate of Joomla, version 1.5 RC3 you will find some Differences as it comes to the SEO functions. First off, the difference in Options in RC2 The SEO Settings in Joomla RC3 So what are the results of this settings: With the Suffix Active As you might notice, the last new option attach’s a .html [...]Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com
We are very excited to have launched our new Joomlashack University, a brand new online class for Joomla. You can learn from our expert team from the comfort of your own home.
We launched late yesterday afternoon with spots limited to only 100 students, but in a few hours we have had over 80 sign up to be part of the quickest and easiest way to learn Joomla.
If you want to grab one of those last few remaining places, you can join Shack U at our special discount "charter" price. You keep that same subscription price as we add more and more courses!
I love iContact because I believe it's the best email newsletter and marketing service
out there. I use it myself, and even built into Simplweb several
tools that make it easy to integrate a Joomla site with an iContact list.
We love to promote iContact as the perfect companion service to a Si [...]
How many sites are you maintaining that are currently running Joomla 1.5? Remember that the end of life for Joomla 1.5 is coming in April 2012. The time for planning for a move is now! Read my article in the August 2011 Joomla Magazine called Nine Questions When Preparing Clients for Joomla 1.8. This contains some important information for you to think about as you prepare your clients for the big move. It has been a while since my latest post, but I really have been busy working on new website building projects. So my time is already limited, because I do all this stuff on the Internet after my normal daytime job. Why? because I like to share knowledge, get in touch with new idea’s and try them [...]
Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com
The Community Leadership Team (CLT) will be hosting a summit on 1 October 2010 through 4 October 2010 in San Jose, California. This will overlap the Joomla! Day West 2010. Members of the CLT will be available for questions and feedback during the Joomla! Day event and are also on the presenter's list.
The CLT is tasked with the operation of the Joomla.org sites including the Extensions Directory, Forums, Resources Directory, Community Magazine, Community Portal, J!People and the teams of volunteers that facilitate these sites (known as the Community Working Groups). One of the primary responsibilities of the CLT is to provide a safe and positive environment for the community. During this summit, the CLT will meet to discuss ways to help the community and the teams and additionally plan and prepare for the future. We want community input for topics that should be discussed. To help facilitate this we have setup a simple form (below) for you to submit your anonymous suggestions for topics to cover.
Addtionally, we are going one step further - a Live streamed "Open for Questions" session will be held on 4 October 2010 from 9am - 10am (GMT-7). This will be available for free to all community members by simply going to the JoomlaCommunity Livestream channel: http://www.livestream.com/joomlacommunity
We look forward to this exciting event and the feedback and participation of everyone!
Click Here to submit your topic suggestions!
Take 30% OFF the price of these select premium Joomlashack templates all weekend long. Sale ends right before the witching hour on Sunday, October 31st at 11:59pm EST. Hurry!
This Post Topic was already in my draft section form January… But as it this turns out great for doing the Keyword research and Using the right tools to get the keyword information you need. Keyword Research Keywords are the most essential part of website creation, especially if you want your website to out perform your competitors. And Since [...]
Post from: Joomla SEO Blog by Pathos-Seo.com
Joomla security - one of the most frequent topics of conversation among Joomie's (usability is a close second) - is a complex area and the technicalities of it quickly get ahead of most Joomla users. Often, it's a conversation about the reputation Joomla has about security that starts "Is Joomla secure?" People are often concerned about the seeming high number of hacked Joomla sites, and people defending Joomla pointing at the need to update 3rd party extensions or use good hosts. There are many specific things you can do to make your site secure. They range from the obvious to making sure folder permissions are correct on the server, to esoteric like changing the jos_ MySQL table prefix that Joomla uses. For 99% of sites, security boils down to: 1. Use a good host, that means paying more than $10 a month. 2. Backup lots. Be like Nike... Just DO it 3. Patch often. Joomla and all your extensions. How many times have you built a site, and your client asked you for some additional information about users who register for the site? They wanted to collect their mailing address, date of birth, a favorite book, or even they just wanted them to accept the terms of service. Unfortunately, in Joomla 1.5, you would have had to install a complex extension like Community Builder to acheive this functionality. Now, however, it's built into Joomla 1.7.Source
30% OFF Halloween Sale at Joomlashack this weekend
01.11.10
Take 30% OFF the price of these select premium Joomlashack templates all weekend long. Sale ends right before the witching hour on Sunday, October 31st at 11:59pm EST. Hurry!
OSM Board Members Take New Leadership Roles
21.06.10
I'm pleased to announce that the OSM Board has new leaders filling critical roles in our organization.
During the past few months, I've spearheaded a project inside Open Source Matters (OSM) to delineate clear roles and responsibilities for a few important positions within our organization.  The goal of this project was to enable our team to more effectively match board members' talents with positions that set them up for success and provided clear objectives and responsibilities.  By putting this project into action, Board members are able to clearly understand what is expected of them within each position, as well as measure their success more objectively with metrics developed by them and their fellow teammates.
This project also provides the Board an opportunity to have a written understanding of the scope these positions.  In the professionalizing of our Board, I strongly believe that actually writing down these positions roles and responsibilities are key to us achieving our goals, and keeping our sanity.  I've even gone as far as to tell candidates for Board positions that one of their key goals should be to find ways to make themselves "obsolete", or in other words, ensure that when it's time for them to hand over their leadership position to another colleague, the new leader can focus on innovation rather than needing to rebuild systems from scratch.
JoomlaCode, 10million downloads and counting
15.06.09
The other day we passed our 10 million downloads on JoomlaCode for Joomla! which is a phenomenal mark. Considering that JoomlaCode is just under two and a half years old that isn't a bad effort. JoomlaCode has turned into a great environment for supporting not only Joomla!'s own development but also Joomla!'s free extension community. Every developer from our community has access to the exact same tools that we on the project use to build Joomla! which I think is pretty cool. But shifting nearly 3 terabytes worth of data each month doesn't happen without a few key people.
What does Microsoft and eBay have in common?
07.10.10
Sitting down in the wake of Joomla! USA West 2010 I've had a bit of a chance to digest what is going on. The event, held at eBay's own campus, was the biggest JoomlaDay's in the USA. However I now come to the realisation that now both Microsoft and eBay share something unique and awesome. What does Microsoft and eBay have in common?
Both have signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement or the JCA. The JCA is the agreement put in place before code is contributed to the project and two of the largest companies in the technology sphere have now signed the JCA. To be honest when you sit down and think about it this is absolutely awesome and a confirmation of what we're doing with the Joomla! project.
I announced that Microsoft signed the JCA back in April and their contribution to the core was support for the cache support Microsoft provide on Windows. This code, now in the Joomla! 1.6 trunk, will hook into the Wincache extension for PHP and provide a speed boost for running Joomla! on Windows. Since then we've kept the Joomla! Web Platform installer project up to the latest version of Joomla! and it is in my mind the easiest way of getting Joomla! up and running on Windows.
Over the weekend we had the announcement that eBay has signed the JCA as well. eBay is the world's largest online marketplace and is internally using Joomla! to build their portal to help enable the organisation to be data driven through analytics. At the JoomlaDay Oliver Ratzesberger, senior director of analytics platform at eBay, demonstrated their platform utilising not only the core Joomla! product but also third party extensions such as social networking platform JomSocial, forum tool Kunena and Mosets Tree.
It is amazing to be in a world where Joomla!, a GPL project, is being contributed to by Microsoft with not only code in the Joomla! core but with members of the company providing support on the forum and are starting to write documentation on our wiki. eBay have only just come into the fold but they've been working on some very exciting stuff that I look forward to seeing in the near future. I am also excited that both Microsoft and now eBay have been supporting Joomla! events with eBay hosting and sponsoring JoomlaDay USA West in addition to Microsoft hosting the upcoming JoomlaDay New York and JoomlaDay Washington, DC events as well as sponsoring JoomlaDay's around the world such as JoomlaDay Bangkok.
At the end of the day it is great that the project that I and many others have been working on for the last half a decade is now being adopted and supported by some of the biggest companies in the world. I think that's just awesome and let's bring on Joomla! 1.6
Joint Summit Report
03.08.11
Joint Summit Attendees:
CLT: Peter Martin, Paul Orwig, Wendy Robinson, Sandra Warren
OSM: Robert Deutz, Alice Grevet, Dianne Henning, Sandy Ordonez, Paul Orwig, Ryan Ozimek, Jacques Rentzke, Marijke Stuivenberg, Akarawuth Tamrareang, Altansukh Tumenjargal
PLT: Chris Davenport, Mark Dexter, Louis Landry, Sam Moffatt, Omar Ramos, Ron Severdia, Jean-Marie Simmonet, Andrea Tarr
Where we came from:
 
Topics Covered and Action Items (where applicable) Created
The following is a brief summary of the topics discussed. Detailed reports will be published as they are produced.
- Removal of the AGPL license from the Joomla Contributor Agreement (JCA)
It was unanimously voted to discontinue the AGPL license. This lessens restrictions and will open up the project to more contributors. - Restructuring
The Joomla Leadership, including the Open Source Matters board, Community Leadership Team, and Production Leadership team, recognize that our current leadership structure could be more effective.  Communication between our teams and the community needs improvement, and oversight needs rethinking.  As a team, we strive to be more effective leaders for the community. To achieve this, we have begun extensive discussions about the project’s leadership structure. This discussion is early and on-going.  As we consider important changes to continue on a path towards more effectiveness, we intend to request community input and feedback to help us in this important effort. - Communications - External
The communications breakout discussion was one of the most lengthy. Audiences and current communications channels were identified - there are many! A review was made of the document produced by the current communications team this past spring, defining what is communications. Roles and responsibilities for the communications team moving forward were listed. Action items include: condensing the 12 newly defined roles into a more manageable list and begin identifying potential owners for these roles. Candidates must have a passion for communications and experience in the specific area (marketing, branding, graphics, etc). - Communications Internal
A working group will be started to bridge the gap when communication needs a boost between the community and the JUGs, the JED, events, merchandise and trademark. A comprehensive leadership directory wiki will be created for a better flow of leadership communication and troubleshooting. The communications team volunteers to disburse intra team communications, and facilitate intra team conflict resolution, including the creation of a FAQ list within the wiki for that purpose. - Internationalization
While English is the common language in the software world, the majority of the world population does not speak English. To increase Joomla’s presence in a proactive way and recruit more non-English-speaking volunteers, the following action items will be implemented: concentrating our efforts in the different regions of the world by identifying one or two community coordinators / contact persons in each region; compiling a list of currently active local communities and JUGs and see if there are any groups which have not yet been accounted for; identifying their needs, the nature of their communities, and recruiting translation help to update the Joomla info pages. - Roadmap and Goals
This discussion first explored the benefits of creating a public unified roadmap that encompasses the entire scope of the Joomla! project. After that, the discussion continued to define a process for creating a public unified roadmap that also includes periodic public progress updates from leadership.
The process for creating a public unified roadmap involves: Leadership defines and publishes an overall mission statement for the project. This is high level and conceptual.
Each leadership team defines and publishes their team’s mission statement, which should support the project’s overall mission. Each leadership team’s mission statement may need to be revised to insure that they all tie in well with the overall project mission statement. Each leadership team defines and publishes their annual goals which support their team’s mission statement. For each leadership team’s goals, the following supporting details will be added and published: milestones (achievement and target completion date); action items (each task required to progress toward achieving the milestone; resource(s): volunteer or paid workers, financial (specify the purpose and budget line item); features (if applicable), action items (if applicable), resources (if applicable). Each leadership team publishes periodic updates during the course of the year regarding their progress on each of their goals. - Volunteer Recruitment and Rentention
The PLT discussed forming a Joomla Outreach Project (JOP), where a "bucket" of tasks is created by teams, using the wiki. Community members would be invited to join these teams, and they would work in alignment with development goals, under the guidance of the PLT. Incentives (such as T-shirts) would be awarded upon the completion of each set of tasks.
Volunteer Now is a plan for recruiting new team members, because teams should be created to manage recurring, long-term tasks that require deeper knowledge. A volunteer engagement page will be created on the wiki, and a Volunteer Now button will link to it from the joomla.org home page. In the wiki a future volunteer will find documentation on how and why we build teams, and contacts for the projects major teams and assets.
A concept will be drafted listing outreach ideas for engaging university students.
- Process Improvement
Regarding processes and messages in correspondence (for example, in areas of trademark, the JED and events), we often need more differentiation and adapted responses to specific situations.
Action items include: reviewing our texts to verify if we are using a friendly approach aimed at optimizing communication; listing and identifying situations and creating responses adapted to them; simplifying language. - Review Developer Sponsorship Program
We talked about the state of the Developer Sponsorship Program and how we handle the involvement of sponsored development time from companies and guide this process more effectively in the future. One Idea was to move from pre to post recognition and use a to-do list and let people pick from the “cookie jar” list to sponsor development time.
Action items include: speaking with the existing sponsors about their experience and writing a report; deciding if a money only approach or money and development time approach is best, finding a volunteer to manage the cookie jar. - Certification
A 1 - 2 plan of certification ideas and how to approach them will be drafted. Feedback from each leadership team will be gathered. The plan will include creating levels for web masters, designers and instructors of joomla, creating a curriculum and courses template for trainers, financial and licensing fees to create more revenue, a test database infrastructure. - Improving Recruitment of New Developers
A story we want to help tell is that Joomla can provide students with CS degrees experience on a global team that goes far beyond just a curriculum. Action items include creating a spreadsheet where we can determine which events developers are attending, and writing a one page messaging document outlining persuasive reasons why the Joomla Platform and CMS are useful for developers, and target university students. - Long Term Roadmap
We talked about the process for establishing goals and milestones for the Joomla project long term releases. Once every 6 months the PLT and developers will meet just before or after an existing event such as a Joomla Day or JandBeyond. We are hoping to do the first one this fall where milestones and goals for the July 2013 long term release will be discussed.
The entire leadership would like to thank eBay for the use of its offices for our summit, and Louis and Ron for coordinating with them. Thanks to Rochen we had tasty lunches, ordered with care by Wendy. And Gunner, our Summit Facilitator Extraordinaire kept us on target and on time!
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