The temperature was mild and sunny that February morning, despite being in Scotland. The dust from the fall of the Berlin Wall was still in the air and there I was, talking to Richard, the husband of the focalizer of a workshop that was taking place in Findhorn, the community I was visiting.

At some point Richard mentioned something about one computer sending messages to another, even if in another country. I then cut him off abruptly. "Now we're talking about magic," I said, making it clear that I had no idea what he was talking about.

Pure utopia

My interlocutor was introducing me to what we now call the internet. After making a quick inquiry over a pay phone (remember those?), Richard told me that in Brazil there was already a hub, the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (Ibase), an NGO that has an institutional history closely linked to the democratization of Brazil and which stood out mainly for its action in the fight against hunger.

It was a dream come true: communication being used by an organization dedicated to a social cause. I had just graduated from university, and my final paper was written on a typewriter. The dominant model of media was one-to-many and the idea that one person could communicate with the entire world, or even with his own community, was pure utopia.

Enter Mambo, and after that…

So a few years after this conversation in North East Scotland I was working at an NGO doing what I could with HTML 1 codes to get the word out there.

It was in this process of learning what was available to be able to incorporate into my work, although I was a journalist and not a code guy, that I discovered my first CMS, Mambo. The tip had come from a team that worked at the Ministry of Education in those days.

It was 2004 and there wasn't even YouTube with its tutorials and advice. With the help of forums and direct phone calls to experienced users all overin different places in Brazil, I learned how to install and handle the CMS. Very soon Joomla arrived on the scene and my courtship turned into a lasting marriage.

I followed each update, each new release of this platform that I consider fantastic, not only for its robustness and applicability, but for the philosophy with which it was built. Although my job is not to develop and install web sites, across all the organizations I've worked for, I've implemented Joomla-based projects.

Today I continue to closely follow the news around this CMS, with the satisfaction of having closely followed the evolution of a great product and a great service for a community without borders.