Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall commenced as new President of Open Source Matters on 25 March 2018. The Joomla Community Magazine had the opportunity to interview her in person during JoomlaDay Florida 2018 in the US. We talked about what she expects from the role, and what we should expect from her regarding the Project. It was informative and FUN (for us, at least)!

What is your main goal for the project this year?

My main goal is to get more visibility for the CMS and more people involved. Our biggest constraint is workload and manpower. Finding new people, reigniting the passion in former and current contributors, empowering teams more are all key factors to making 2018 a success. We made a great start this past year, but with all the changes to the structure a lot of things have just started to settle and kick into action. 

How do you intend to do that?

The wonderful thing we have now - let me take Marketing as an example. Soon we will have a marketing strategy published, which is important for people, especially newcomers, to understand what roles are available. Until now, we've only said we need people, we need help, but it has never really been defined. We're now on VolunteerMatch, and in the next couple of weeks we will be populating the roles we already know about onto that. VolunteerMatch is a big not-for-profit site that matches people who looking to volunteer with volunteering positions. So, that should help alongside internal promotion efforts such as social media.  A success story is with the recruitment of the GDPR Group, the compliance team. We put out a call and we now have some brilliant experts. Targeting our roles and niching them down so that new or returning volunteers have a more structured role.

Could I say then that Marketing is the team that will have more improvements to promote Joomla?

Noreen has worked with the project for the last six months and she has just produced a marketing strategy for the next year and beyond to follow the release of Joomla 4. I think we've improved. This year we're getting better, especially on the social side, which has really picked up. With Chiara we have this new beautiful visual language, that was published in the Magazine in February. That is going to help our image to change. Joomla 4 is a major marketing opportunity. We need to market outside of the core a bit. There are also goals to publish content on other sites such as opensource.com and cmscritic.com, and start talking to people outside of our realm.

It is likely that you will be OSM President when Joomla 4 is released. Do you have a strategy for when that moment comes?

Marketing has worked hard on a plan for release and is already working on getting a good teaser campaign going beforehand and we're hoping to live-release it, do it on a webcast, push a big button, make a lot of noise.  We're also looking for release sponsors for Joomla 4. This is the first time we have offered a release sponsorship opportunity and we hope to secure one to enable us to market the launch of Joomla 4 properly.

As new President of OSM, what is your message for the Joomla community?

We have an exciting and challenging year ahead of us with the release of a major version.  I hope we can all work together to make Joomla 4 and 2018 successful!