This month we are happy to interview the newly elected Vice President of Open Source Matters, Nicola Galgano.

Nicola is a long term, passionated contributor from Italy, with a past in the Bug Squad and many hours spent on the Joomla Issue Tracker, squashing bugs and encouraging tests.

Thanks, Nicola, for joining us in this interview. Could you tell us a little more about yourself? (where are you from, where do you live, family, your background, anything you want to share with us)

My pleasure! I'm Italian, I live in the wonderful "caput mundi" city... (hum… wonderful for tourists)... anyway... I'm digressing... background... I’ve started this trip coding a simple 1-pixel horizontal move on a Commodore VIC20 and something else like that, too much time ago, unfortunately.

Why did you decide to run for Vice President?

I like to contribute to Open Source Projects. I've learned a lot, and that helped my career, and I think that giving back and sharing "experiences" is the minimum that I can do. Last but not least, I believe that some changes are needed, and I can help with that, or at least,  I believe so.

How do you see the role of the Vice President in Joomla?

As for now, it’s like someone who enters a control room, with lots of colored blinking buttons, but cannot push any. It should be the bridge between inside and out, to lower, or better, to defeat this barrier, to be "all together as a whole".

In your manifesto, you positioned yourself as the loyal dissenter, whose role is to disagree and point out flaws in whatever decision the group has reached. You’ve had a few Board meetings by now, how is this role working out for you? And how does Joomla benefit from this?

Very well, there is no need to disagree if there are no flaws. In my humble professional experience, exploring different solutions has always been a plus, in order to make informed and successful decisions.

Which will be the major challenges you want to tackle during your term?

Engage more people, enlarge the number of active volunteers. We have a big chance with Joomla 4, we just need to perform, together, the last mile.

The Vice President role is the first Board position you are holding within Joomla Community, but you have been actively involved as a volunteer. Could you tell us more about your involvement with Joomla? Why do you volunteer, and what does volunteering mean to you?

True, honestly it is the same thing. If you decide to contribute to a community-driven project, you need to take into account that sooner or later, you’ll be put in front of a choice: simply express your ideas, or spend yourself in front of the public, doing it, in the hope that the idea is shared, and more important, that it goes live (hopefully in the shortest time). Someone can even describe this, like ego satisfaction, but it's not like that. All of you, this project, prove to me that it's not like that. So to answer the question: the pleasure to share some lines of code. It worked for me.

Is there anything we forgot to ask but should have asked you?

For sure, anyway, if you have any questions, proposals etc for the Board of Open Source Matters, I invite everybody to use this channel: https://github.com/open-source-matters/contact-us.

But now, I have a question, for you all:

What stops you from joining a team? Feel free to post your answers in the discussion repository!