If you read his author bio here on the JCM website, you'll find Philip Walton is a rower, juggler, cricket fan, warm beer tasting expert, unicyclist and a patented inventor. He's also the Secretary of the Board of Open Source Matters (the organisation that facilitates Joomla). What does this serial Board Member think about Joomla and its community? "We are a massive success story, and it's so easy to forget that." Let's find out more about Phil, his role, his achievements so far and the challenges and he sees for Joomla!

Congratulations on being elected as our brand new Secretary, Philip! Let's start with a couple of super personal questions to get to know you a bit better.

Your favourite food: I really like Greek Salad, I've had fights down the pub on this one when someone said "But if it were your last meal, wouldn't you want to push the boat out and have something exotic?" But I just like a good fresh Greek salad.

What do you usually have for breakfast: I make my own muesli. I live between my house and my partner Kats' flat. Dr Bedford, otherwise referred to as Kat is a mediaeval historian and my beautiful and forgiving better half. She puts up with my hippy vegetarian ways.  I have two different homemade mueslis, one at each venue. Both have a base of porridge oats with lots of different dried fruits, chia and flax seeds, then lashings of 100% chocolate nibs and some ginger to give it an interesting kick.

Best movie ever: Brazil or Watchmen, depends on the mood.

Last work of fiction you’ve read: Well the last work of fiction that I enjoyed was not read but listened to, although I do read it as well, especially the back cover. We just finished listening to all 26 episodes of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" while doing car journeys.

Your best invention: My best invention isn't in the public domain, so I cannot talk about it, but I was proud of my first that I designed and took all the way through the patenting process to get my first patent and that's the Liquid Rechanneling Device Mk 1.

Five words that describe you: This is difficult and so I put Kat on the spot, how would she describe me? Lots of pondering and a big smile produced this: Gentleman, Caring, Focused, Funny, Intelligent.

This is your fourth role within the Board of Open Source Matters. Is it Hotel California, a secret wish to stay on longer than Luca Marzo, or something else that makes you want to stay on the Board?

Thick skin probably helps.
And you are cheating a bit to say four as one of the roles, Marketing, was restructured and became Outreach during my term, so I'm not quite the serial board member you make me out to be!
I see the board as a job that needs to be done, but is very separate from the fun part of Joomla. 

My first role was Marketing and that came about simply because there was no Marketing team, to this day I still don't know how it exploded and vanished. Joomla 4 was on the horizon and I was very much into testing and CMS release team, I decided that without some marketing it was going to be a huge flop and as no one else wanted to do it I would step out of my comfort zone and have a go.
I would not have got through it without George Wilson and Benjamin Trenkle on the production side and Tom van der Laan and Louise Hawkins in the nescient marketing team. It was once they joined that it developed structure and the requisite talents needed.

The Vice President role was to stay on and help a new board that seemed to be functioning much more than when I joined, the nature changed when our President Crystal Dionysopoulos became ill and I had to step into the other role as well as VP, and in the midst of that I became release manager for 6!
I would have been very happy to retire from the board at that point and call it a day.

Well to me this still sounds like four roles. Anyway, why did you decide to run for this specific position? 

With Luca wanting to step down but unable to find a replacement, I thought if someone has to do it, I may as well serve my time.
Ideally I would like the Secretary role to have an assistant who can be brought on, a bit like a President, VP sort of structure, so that there is some continuity, but for the moment I am still learning and seeing if things can be streamlined and simplified.
There is no handover process, so there needs to be documentation and procedure in place to make it a smoother transition.

What does the secretary do?

Lots of going through emails, liaising with people on the board and in the organisation who do things.
There are several main areas of work.
Getting the twice a month board meeting ready, facilitating the meeting, and recording the meeting.

Adding new members to Gmail who need a community.joomla.org email address and facilitating adding and removal of members in Mattermost.

Keeping a knowledge of the workings of the board to the forefront so there is continuity and consistency.

What do you consider your biggest challenge at the moment?

It's clear that my predecessor was under a lot of pressure and so I am at the moment reading through past correspondence and catching up with the publishing and updating of documents. The motions registry is up to date now and I am publishing all the reports when I get a moment.
I will need to encourage the updating of the volunteers portal so that future elections or meetings are properly represented by the correct list of members.

During the four years you’ve been on the Board, what have you learned about Joomla?

Joomla, as opposed to OSM, interesting...

There is a perceived Them and Us attitude that is not really justified.
If you understand Joomla's history and respect:

• that it's a high end secure CMS that does not want to be bloated with lots of extensions for specific tasks (shop, membership, file management), but could use tools for the core aspects, blogging, SEO and some areas;
• that it's lacked such as posting to social media for the articles that we all add;
• that it's multi-lingual and as accessible as can be;

then there is no reason that you cannot join any team, lead any team with consensus and be on the board looking after Joomla.

But that takes trust in the community, and trust takes time to grow, so yes, there is an exposure period and a trust-building period, but there is also a very open desire from those who do to have more people taking on the higher levels of governorship and leadership.

What does the Board of Open Source Matters do?

There is a difference between do and should do. The gap is the time it takes to get things happening.

The board should facilitate the project and represent the project internationally, facilitating the engagement with other international bodies and organisations.

It has not always done this, and it will take time for a cohesive board to develop and find its feet and confidence to be able to project Joomla and its strengths to the wider audience.

The board and certain positions in the board should push for sponsorship and safeguard the funding of Joomla to allow it to have the resources to meet, develop and grow.

In your opinion, what would the ideal Board for OSM look like? 

There is no ideal as the ideal will change over time as projects mature and change, so their governance needs change and develop.

But I would say the ideal board would have a President who has a charismatic personality, who can engage with the wider world and get Joomla in front of big sponsors and conferences to grow the world wide audience. Someone who has that vision thing! Difficult to describe but obvious when you see it.

A VP who supports the president but focuses on nurturing individuals in the teams and helps them find their feet. Someone who grows teams and ideas to strengthen the community.

A secretary who is grounded in what Joomla is and agile enough to facilitate the departments, helping them with their day-to-day business, anticipating problems and issues that they might face and building solutions that smooth their workload so they can concentrate on their teams.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishments from your previous roles?

In the CMS team: I think bringing in more systematic testing, but that was in an early stage, and asking Sigrid Gramlinger to take over when I knew I was not right for the role, as she did a far better job than me and took it to the next level with Benjamin Trenkle.

In marketing: just nailing the date we would launch 4. Yes, in hindsight, saying the Birthday of Joomla for major releases is not a good idea, but that year we needed to get it out. Galvanising the team to get behind a specific date and making it public so we didn't slip was fundamental to getting 4 launched. The real work was with George Wilson, Harald Leithner, Benjamin Trenkle and the rest of the maintainers who peddled like mad to make it happen. But there had been opposition to ever having open dated releases in case we failed, and that point of view meant… we failed.

When we were given the challenge we met it and then Benjamin with many others helping took it to a new level with the 2 year Major, 6 week Minor release pattern which allows us to plan years in advance and to date we have never missed a release date.

As VP: the Joomla Academy. Just before writing this I was going through the first candidates’ test projects and seeing some really good entries.
I set them a challenge I actually wrote years ago and so knew what to expect… A few went above and beyond and one made me smile with the realisation that they, as students, had done a much better job than I did back then. So that boards really well for the upcoming projects and the future of Joomla.

A huge thank you to the sponsors without whom we could not have got this off the ground and the mentors who are essential to make it work.

Where would you say Joomla stands at the moment?

Challenged with resources, both money and people.

We need and have needed for as long as I can remember, more people to step up and take hold of the reins.
Many people do multiple tasks and that's just too much. We get into that vicious circle that there isn't time to find and train new people as we need to do the job, but to do the job well we need a succession of people to help do the job and train others to do it.

One area I am impressed with and that's the maintainers; they are a team that just does and is slowly growing as more and more release managers are brought in and onboarded.

Eventually I would like to see the release managers for each release move from 2 to 3 with 2 experienced and 1 totally new to the job being trained through the experience and grounded in the practices, so that they can then be one of the experienced in the next or future team.

As a release manager with no previous experience and another Gary with no previous experience, I find it's tough and a very steep learning curve but it has meant an alliance and bonding with the more experienced release managers Richard Fath and Heiko Lübbe, who manage the 5.4 release.

In your opinion, what challenges is Joomla facing?

Back to money and people.

I think agencies who use Joomla should put their hands in their pockets from time to time and give either experience and work, or money. It is very short-sighted to milk the cow that feeds you but not feed it.

And the generosity of the Academy Sponsors, which blew my mind, shows there are individuals and organisations willing to help bring on a new generation of Jooma programmers.

What do you consider the best things about Joomla and its community?

We are a massive success story, and it's so easy to forget that.

An anarchic incoherent group of individuals who gravitated around an open source fork and made it work, and not just work but work for 20 years, that's a huge achievement and one that's easy to overlook.

There are over 148 million downloads of Joomla, that's a fact and a huge statistic.

I run a nationally important site using it and sites that were using other CMSs but were hacked so had to be moved on to something more secure, and we don't shout about that enough.

The teams that stear Joomla get a lot of criticism in the community; we are often very self critical but that same team has kept the project going and made a huge success of it.
There are so many websites that have come and gone:

• Myspace
• Friends reunited
• Yahoo

And CMS systems that had millions backing them but are no longer alive:

• Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS)
• Mambo
• Apache Lenya
• Apache AxKit
• Jakarta Slide
• MiaCMS
• Semantic MediaWiki Plus (SMW+)
• Adobe Business Catalyst
• PHP-Nuke
• BBoard

They didn't stand the test of time against an unpaid, multinational, volunteer group who just got the job done.

If you had to pick three words to describe Joomla now, what would those words be and why?

Secure - because it is and that's really important in this day and age when so many sites get hacked.

Fun - I really enjoy spinning up new sites and getting a client project finished and the enjoyment and satisfaction that comes from using Joomla.

Yours - With so many solutions that store the data on their servers, and are not in any way as extensible, it's a joy to know that this is a product that is totally self owned.
That's powerful.

What role do you see for the secretary when it comes to growing Joomla?

A quiet facilitator.

If to-do requests come in and elections happen with the minimum of fuss I will be happy.
I have pondered if this should be a paid position, a full time post for someone (not me) who could become more involved in the marketing and sponsorship side of Joomla, and I think that's something to consider.

Anything else you'd like to share with us?

Yes, that we are a community and the best way to get on in a community is to ask and share, not tell and take.

If you ask and show you are willing to give, you will get back a lot more and the community will grow in strength.
If you just bring problems without helping to be part of the solution, you will weaken the community and make it a poorer place.

There is room for honest self reflection, but there are also ways to do it. Sometimes the ‘all together’ aspect seems to be missing and a ‘what's in it for me’ comes out.

All together we are stronger, Joomla is stronger. I look forward to seeing many of my Joomla friends in person at JDay NL where we can hopefully chat over a Greek salad while sipping a warm beer.