2 minutes reading time (399 words)

Summing Up the Joint Summit

Summing Up the Joint Summit

For three days this weekend, 21 members of the Joomla! project leadership met in San Jose to bond, exchange, and make plans for the future. The days were packed with many important topics. Fortunately Gunner, our facilitator, mixed the right amount of humor and physical movement as he deftly moved the agenda points along and constantly verified that each person had a chance to be heard.

I was looking forward to meeting those who have been contributing to Joomla! since it began, as well as the newer members, knowing that we all share a passion for Joomla! and care deeply about its success. One of the things I liked best about the summit was feeling like one team sharing common goals and a collaborative, unified vision, instead of three isolated leadership groups.

Gunner uses a technique called the "spectrogram", where the room is divided into two extreme reactions to a statement. One side of the room signifies strong agreement, and the opposite side represents strong disagreement. Participants place themselves between the two sides of the room at the spot on the spectrogram that best represents their feeling about it. They are then given the chance to express why they chose to stand where they did, which occasionally inspires other participants to shift their position a bit.

One of the last human images of the summit, was a final spectrogram in reaction to a series of discussions about the sensitive subject of leadership restructuring. While these discussions are still in their early stages, and differences of opinion remain, I will always remember the respect, unity and common ground expressed by the majority of participants standing shoulder to shoulder (or close to it) on one side of the room, and the thoughts expressed as we stood there.

The work covered at the summit is reported in the Leadership blog. This succinct summary will soon be followed by detailed reports inviting feedback from the community. Photos and video are being uploaded as well.

I'll end with the results of our joint leadership Joomla! elevator pitch mashup — another fun Gunner activity to loosen us up and get our Joomla! juices flowing!:

Joomla! is free and open source software for people and organizations that need a dynamic web presence.

Joomla makes it easy to create and maintain powerful websites. 25 million websites can’t be wrong!

Download it at J-O-O-M-L-A dot ORG. It’s free!
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Open Source Matters July 2011 Report
Joomla! in the Press/Media - August 2011
 

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