I’ve had a long break in maintaining this blog. The pause stemmed from change of role that got me thinking whether to re-invent this blog. A perfect reason to start again was offered last Saturday by the Joomla Day Finland 2011.
What business I had with Joomla Day? Isn’t Microsoft the bastion of closed source?
Since my previous post, I’ve changed into a new role. My external responsibilities are focused on narrowing the gap between the open source communities and Microsoft through research, collaboration and community engagement in Finland. Openness and interoperability strategy development and implementation, open data and competitiveness in the cloud platform offering are also in my field of interests. Internally, I'm responsible for driving the competitive strategy and intelligence.
So sponsoring events like the Joomla Day are an important way to create relations with the local open source community and spread information on what Microsoft is doing to interoperate better with other technology platforms.
The Joomla Day Finland 2011 was organized in center of Helsinki at Hub Helsinki. Hub Helsinki is vibrant place for start-up companies.
I distributed a briefing material on Microsoft's perspective on openness. Here is a PDF version for easy exploration of included links.
Ryan provided a look back into Joomla's past and described the vision for the Joomla of the future. The core Joomla community has just changed their organization model. The core team has changed focus from coding to steering the vision, strategy and roadmap.
As a side note, Ryan used his sister studying in California as an example how the next generation of users enjoy internet accessible services: Doing email? Facebook! Group discussions? Facebook! Sharing Photos? Facebook! And the list goes on...
Ryan has a business called PICnet that aims to root inefficiencies from non-profit organizations. Idea was born out of visit to Albanian refugee camp and later plane crash that took several aid workers helping Albania. Those events created the motivational focal point for Ryan.
The next big change in Joomla is to elevate Joomla from product oriented community into a platform. Platform that just happens to host a CMS as a product. Innovation on the platform is encouraged by easy forking on github service (just push a button). Currently 102 forks exist of Joomla.
Mobility is going to be the most popular way to access Internet services by 2013/14. How to keep Joomla relevant in mobile world? Miikka analysed the key mobile trends and discussed what are the key things to keep a platform relevant in mobile world.
The old joomlaportal.fi site has been without maintenance for some time. Janne introduced the new Joomla.fi site and told experiences about the upgrade.
Kunena is a popular Joomla forums extension - it has been installed on about 300-500,000 websites and has 100,000 downloads per version. Matias Griese, the lead developer of Kunena, told the Kunena history and discussed their views on how to create a successful open source software.
This panel discussion moderated by Ugur Kaner with Ryan, Janne, Matias and Mirko Erkkilä (of clicker) as panelists, continued the theme of how to create business on top of open source.
Joomla community was described as more versed and accustomed to commercialization of extensions and templates that most other communities. Still there are problems with differing customer expectations on what is free and what to pay for. For a business, it’s important to decide what kind of customers you want and communicate that effectively.
Templates were seen as the most commercially successful part of the ecosystem. Building internet based services on top of Joomla was seen as the most potential way to build business on top of the Joomla ecosystem.
This panel discussion was moderated by Miikka with Ryan, Janich Rasmussen and myself as panelists.Ryan decribed the Joomla Contributor Agreements that eBay and Microsoft have signed. The Microsoft contributions is related to enabling Joomla to run on top of SQL Server and the cloud based SQL Azure. Also the performance of Joomla on top of IIS has been a focus point (enabling WinCache integration). Joomla has also been packaged into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and the web based Web App Gallery.
As a comment to the previous panel, I noted that economically the Joomla and generic Microsoft technology ecosystems are quite similar. Both have parties offering training, consultation, design and hosting services and industry specific solutions. For every 1 euro that Microsoft gains in revenue, it’s partner ecosystem gains 8 euros. So the difference between Joomla and Microsoft ecosystems is that 1/9th of economic value.
I think we have more in common than we often realize.
[Edit 11.11.2011: Corrected the 2nd panel panelists and tuned the text on Matias Griese's speak for accuracy]