The Joomla! Project: Why Community Matters, Wilco Jansen, CMSExpo Keynote

By Nancy Garrity | Published Apr 30, 2009

Wilco Jansen, the Joomla! (news, site) Development Coordinator and an Open Source Matters board member talked about the importance of engaging the community in his keynote at the CMS Expo today.

While not everyone can commit code, it is still possible to make significant contributions to the project in other more accessible ways like answering questions on the forums.

In addition to engaging the community, the GPL license plays a key role in advancing the growth of the project. There are currently more than 4000 registered extensions available for download under the GPL license.

There is no one person making key decisions, rather leadership is provided through working groups.

For a large group of volunteers, Wilco says that it is quite well organized and "it is a business, not a science project."

[Editor's Note: See our detailed article Open Source: The GPL, Your CMS Project and You]

About the Author

Nancy Garrity, the featured Keynote Speaker for the Thursday luncheon at CMS Expo 2009, has been working with content management software for more than ten years. As a member of the Documentum consulting team, she worked with customers to design and develop a wide range of content-based applications. She later went on to start the Documentum Developer Program, a service that provides a variety of resources for application developers.

As the Community Manager for Alfresco, Nancy’s goal is to foster an environment where community members “feed-themselves” by growing the community, providing an infrastructure that facilitates contribution and recognizing achievement.