observations from CMS Expo

[Paul Orwig]

Hi all,

I wanted to share some observations from CMS Expo. I spent Monday-Thursday there representing Joomla. David Hurley also came out for Wednesday and Thursday. I saw Don Gilbert there on Thursday, and a number of others from the Joomla community were also there.

I joined an informal meeting of Joomla users on Monday night that included a lot of questions and answers type of discussion, and I spoke at two CMS Expo sessions (one just about Joomla and the other in a panel discussion about CMS in the enterprise). There were three other Joomla-centric sessions there too.

Acquia had a booth there, WordPress did too, and so did some of the other CMS', but Joomla didn't. There was a fair amount of feedback from Joomla people there that they wish Joomla had a booth there. Getting a booth for CMS Expo was something that OSM discussed, but decided not to move forward with that for this year.

I think CMS Expo is a good event for Joomla to have an more prominent presence at in the years to come. Here are some reasons why:

• It's a good opportunity to see what areas other CMS' are innovating in, so that we can bring back ideas for improving Joomla. It was good that David Hurley could come, and I saw Don Gilbert on Thursday (I'm not sure if he was there earlier in the week too). I really wish some PLT members had also been able to come, and I hope some will go next year.
• It's a good opportunity to educate not only business decision makers about what Joomla can do, but also some speakers and thought leaders who have a strong voice about CMS developments. Many of them don't really understand what Joomla is capable of, or they have concerns about using it or recommending it because they don't see the stability that's there with the backing of a major agency like Acquia or Automattic. Because of that, some of them (business decision makers and speaketend to not think of Joomla as a serious CMS for larger business users.
• It's a good opportunity to show support for Joomla developers and agencies. When they are more successful, I think it brings in more opportunities for everyone and that can lead to more attention and contributions to Joomla in code and in other ways.
• It's a good opportunity to listen to and learn from users outside the Joomla community. One of the criticisms about last year's survey on overall project goals was that it mainly focused on the Joomla community instead of those outside of the community. Participating in events like CMS Expo can help us to learn more about what is important and not important to those outside of the Joomla community
  

We are doing better at trying to have a stronger presence at non-Joomla events and conferences (CeBIT, FOSDEM, OSCON, and  CoderFaire). I think having a stronger presence at CMS Expo fits right in with that idea, and I think it will help us be more successful with our three year vision statement to increase adoption of the CMS and Framework.

Thanks,

paul

[David Hurley]

Paul,

I think you raise some good points and brought several things out that I saw as well. I'm also hoping to send an email with some of the impressions I received and hope to be able to share that with everyone and get feedback and ideas.

Thank you for the summary and confirmation of our ongoing focus to demonstrate a strong presence at non-Joomla events. 

-

Thanks,
David Hurley
Joomla! Community Development Manager

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[Michael Babker]

Something I noticed is that there was a lot of chatter on this list about CeBIT, including a call for volunteers to support the event, but aside from a couple of mentions about the event coming up in a CeBIT overview thread, that same effort wasn't made for CMS Expo.  It's harder for me to attend events during the week, but had I known that we didn't have a strong leadership presence in Chicago, I would've made the effort to get the week off and head up there.

As I did for CoderFaire, I think we need to identify events we want to have a representation at in advance so that we can make the effort to get folks there.  If there's already dates available for other events this year, we should have them on our calendar and discuss what the event's focus is and figure out who would be able to represent us, keeping in mind things like geographic locations and what other events those folks are attending so we don't stretch them thin.

Another selling point for expanding our event coverage is to grow our community.  As I pointed out while pitching CoderFaire, Joomla doesn't appear to have a strong community presence in the Nashville area, which has a strong PHP developer community given the presence of several meetup groups and a PHP and Wordpress User Group.  So, this gives us a chance to pitch Joomla and answer some of those misconceptions folks may have about the software.

Ending on a more upbeat tone, I saw a lot of traffic on Twitter about CMS Expo and how great it was for those in attendance.  I'm glad that there were some strong takeaways from the event and hope we can use those to strengthen our community and software.

[Paul Orwig]

@Michael - Thanks, that's good feedback. I think there wasn't as much discussion on email lists about CMS Expo compared to CeBIT mostly because we did choose to pay to get a stronger official presence at CeBIT, but we didn't choose to do that for CMS Expo. I encouraged PLT members to go to CMS Expo, but I don't recall if that was on email lists or in the leadership Skype chat or both. I know David Hurley also talked to some PLT members about going to CMS Expo, but things didn't work out for that. I'm sorry you weren't more aware of CMS Expo - it would have been great to have you there!

We've had "create a list of conferences/events to consider participating in" on OSM's events team list for a long time, but I think it has just been seen as one of those "not too urgent" things and so that hasn't ever gotten done. If nothing else, as events have come up this year that someone does say that we should consider participating in, that is helping us to at least begin to build a short list of non-Joomla events to participate in

I would encourage all leadership teams to continually be on the lookout for events and conferences you feel are interesting or worthwhile, and maybe that way we can be more proactive about building a better overall list of non-Joomla conferences/events to participate in.

Here are the non-Joomla conferences and events for this year that I can think of that we have at least talked about to some extent:

• CeBIT (we participated in CMSGarden)
• FOSDEM (we applied to participate but didn't get accepted)
• CMS Expo (we chose not to sponsor - David and I went)
• OSCON (we applied for a free booth at non-profit pavilion but we didn't get accepted)
• Community Leadership Summit (more about leadership development than promoting Joomla - in Portland in July or August)
  
• CoderFaire (we are participating - in Nashville in August)
  
• Grace Hopper (for women in technology, more about leadership development than promoting Joomla - in Minneapolis in October I think)

Thanks again,

paul

[Andrea Tarr]

One of the problems with going to CMS Expo is that it is so close to JAB. It's difficult to get time to get away for both and JAB is the one Joomla event in the year that is developer oriented.

Andy

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Andrea Tarr

at...@tarrconsulting.com