Soapbox Engage Blog

With Joomla!Day Melbourne 2013 taking place this week down in Australia, and with my upcoming travel to speak at Joomla!Day India in early February 2013, I took a little time this weekend to reflect on the incredible success of the Joomla open source community.  There's a lot that goes into an open source project that moves it from mediocrity to superstardom, not the least of which is actually the code that people enjoy writing and using.

In thinking about my presentation for Joomla!Day India, one key metric of success stood out amongst all others for the Joomla community:  empowerment.

In my relatively short 15 years in the open source world, I have yet to find another project that is able to as effectively strike the solid balance between attraction of new members that know little-to-nothing about software development, and the hardcore engineers looking to leverage a power web framework.  Based on my years within the Joomla project, and my term serving as a leader of it, I've come to realize that the key differentiator for me has been the community's focus on empowering anyone to contribute.

Now, I'm not saying it's always easy to contribute.  Often times the barriers are high.  For instance, if you know nothing about development, you're likely not going to get a pull request granted to the Joomla core any time soon.  However, if you're willing to give of your time to contribute to the strengthening of a larger worldwide community, you're going to find ample opportunities for you in the Joomla world.

That, my friends, is the difference between Joomla and other open source projects I've seen.  Fully protected by a non-profit organization, and 100% managed and operated by volunteers from around the world, Joomla's success demands empowerment opportunities.  Without it, there likely would be no Joomla as we know it today.

I know that for myself, the opportunity to contribute to something bigger than my own ideas gives me a sense that we as a community can build something pretty amazing.  I can't wait to see what comes out of 2013!