Meet Sarah Watz: interview with OSM President

My biggest dream is to keep on contribute to the next generation.

- Sarah Watz

Here is the interview with Sarah Watz - the President of OpenSourceMatters, Inc. which she became in April, 2014. Being with Joomla from its foundation, she has been involved into community life and contributed to the project for years. Sarah lives in Stockholm, Sweden and she is also a co-founder of PixPro studio. I decided that it would be cool to talk with President and ask her about everything what would be interesting for us. So, here we go.

The interview was taken in the middle of October and has been published only now, so some kind of informaiton might be revised.

Sarah, being a President is not only the title, but a honorable duty. How has your life changed after you got this status?

With the role as the President of Open Source Matters Inc come legal responsibilities as well as high expectations from the community. I have prioritized my time more than I did before to make sure that I focus on the right things I would like to be part of and to have achieved during my time as the President. And I have got the possibility to travel to places I haven’t been before to meet inspirational people that shares the same passion as me – Joomla.

The digital communication agency Pixpro Stockholm is a job, but OSM activity is a pure enthusiastic contribution. How do you balance these two activities?

It’s always a challenge for everyone that contributes to find a balance of work time, family time and contribution time. Not to mention “me” time. I’ve previously set up my business Pixpro Stockholm so I don’t have be physically present for my team and our clients as long as I’m available for communication with them when they need me. I have delegated even more to my team since I was elected and they have taken on the challenge with pride and joy. They are growing each day and making things happening for us. I’ve spent more time on OSM than I thought I would have to do. But I do believe that the Joomla Project is in a very interesting phase that needs as much of our attention as we can give to make progress for the future. Family time is the most important part. And I try to be present when I have family time but I have to admit it is challenging at times.

Joomla ideology stands for Open Source software, charity and personal contribution of community members. All activities are based on pure free will and as a result some things happen slowly and turn into commercial way… which means that eventually it won’t be Joomla anymore. Is it possible to break this vicious circle and increase efficiency of members without departing from the initial ideology?

I do not share your fear that Joomla will stop existing in the near future. And I think there are opportunities existing when there is good balance between free solutions and commercial services for Joomla. It does not need to be one or the other. I do share your belief that the Joomla Community can be faster in getting things done together. So I’m very happy to be part of the initiative for changing the project organizational structure and methodology. I strongly believe that we need to change the way we organize the Joomla project both in how we are structured and how we carry out the day to day tasks moving forward. My hope is that one of the many outcomes of this change will be to make it easier to embrace our differences in languages, cultures and markets more than we have been doing so far. And also find a way to work on different levels global, regional and local to be able to achieve more together. If we all do what we love and are empowered to do it with clear objectives and have the mandates to do it, we will be stronger as a professional organization powered by volunteers than any corporate business with paid staff. There are no stronger incentives for getting things done than passion and contribution. And Joomla has both :)

JED is one of the most important parts of Joomla infrastructure. Are there any plans to make JED rules more strict and take control of the quality for extensions that 3rd party developers are submitting?

I’m totally confident that the JED team have thought of different ways of improving the JED that we will see rolled out in the future. I don’t have any details so I would suggest you would ask them.

All extensions should be released under GPL v.3 license. How can you estimate the situation globally? Does it prevent 3rd party developers to create high quality extensions?

Having the GPL v.3 as a standard doesn’t affect the business model in a bad way. There are great extensions built by developers around the globe that provides services for updates, maintenance, documentation and support for their extensions that is appreciated and happily paid for by their clients.

Can you give some advices for those who would like to start developing with Joomla but still doubting?

I believe that the Joomla code is a great foundation for development but the biggest advantage Joomla has is the strong developer community that is there for you when you need to ask questions and to coach you to become even sharper developer.

You’re overseeing Joomla Certification program. Sarah, could you, please give us some more details: will the program be paid? Will it be online Certification center with automatic processes or each submission will be preceded by real examiner?

The certification tests will be taken online and the user will need to be physically present in the same room as the proctor (overseer) who will be a representative from a JUG, a JoomlaDay, or at a company that have asked to be able to proctor the certification tests. There will be a fee to take the test that will be paid towards the Joomla project. The amount will be different for different parts of the world. The exact fee and it has not been released yet. There will be more information available at certification.joomla.org

Would it be possible to release real time Certification in one of the accredited centers and cover different countries any time soon?

The first pilot for the Joomla Administrator Certification will be at the Joomla World Conference in Cancun, Mexico, in November 2014. After the feedback of that pilot we will start offering the Joomla Administrator Certification. I know there are some upcoming JoomlaDays that have been really interested to get this on their agenda. The Certification Program Team has members that are translating the test in several languages so when they are ready they will also be available. There will be more information on the certification.joomla.org site where and when certification will be available and in what languages you can take them.

Are there any time limits for the exam? If somebody’s failed, when he can make another try?

Yes, there will be a time limit to take the exam. If someone fails they can make another try after 30 days.

Granting certificates in paper format will increase motivation of specialists to get it since it would be possible either hang it on the wall or demonstrate it on the interview… What do you think about such opinion?

I know that the Certification Program Team has been talking about it. It’s been discussed if there should be an extra fee to cover the postage and handling of the paper version of the certification and if it would be possible how the organization will handle it. Nothing has been decided yet if it is going to be offered or not.

First Joomla Night met in Stockholm, Sweden at 2010 and you were its organizer. Has this event become an example for other local JUGs and grows, what do you think?

Our idea of arranging a Joomla!Night instead of a Joomla!Day was just to get people that can’t assign a whole day to Joomla to be able to meet for an evening with presentations and discussions on one single topic. In 2010 the topic was how the Joomla project evolved with different forks of Joomla like Nooku and Molajo. It was a really hot topic then and we live streamed it with many viewers around the world that saw it and discussed it on Twitter. I know many got interested in arranging Joomla!Nights after this because it takes less to arrange it than a Joomla!Day.

J & Beyond might be considered as a global European Joomla event. And Joomla World Conference traditionally takes place in another part of the world with strong Joomla Community - in the USA and now in Mexico. I may assume the choice of a place for next events is related to activity of local JUG’s or it’s potentially possible to see next JWC in any other place on the planet?

It’s been talked about that the Joomla World Conference will move from place to place when it started as an event. The first two JWC was in the USA, first year in San Jose on the West Coast and the second year in Boston on the East Coast. This year it’s in Mexico which is a better place to arrange it than the USA due to less VISA restrictions for many citizens around the globe. You have to ask the Event Team what their plans are for next year. I’m sure that they have great plans for the upcoming 10 year anniversary of Joomla.

Your main goal in Joomla is reaching internalization and involving local JUGs to the worldwide community. What JUGs and local communities should do to reach such goal?

It is important for Joomla to have global, regional and local presents. The global to get more knowhow of how the global activities affects the local presents. A good example is that Joomla is really good at the Google markup of content on a Joomla website. But there is not that much for other search engines like the most popular Russian search engine. So we need more developers that knows how the local users would like to use Joomla to be active in contributing knowledge and code to the global project. I would like to encourage those that would like to contribute to Joomla in all levels to sign up here http://www.joomla.org/contribute

to get started. You will be contacted by one of the mentors to help you get started getting involved in a team where you can help out.

Sarah, do your family members support you in your activity? Are they involved in OpenSource too? :-)

My family wholeheartedly supports my efforts in contributing to Joomla. My husband Peter has many Joomla websites, one of the most popular one’s is about one of his passions BBQ. My son Philip has done some school projects with Joomla to fundraise his class trip to northern parts of Sweden this fall. He has also has attended the Joomla World Conference and loved it.

Dreams are better to keep in secret, but what’s your main target in life that might be voiced?

My biggest dream is to keep on contribute to the next generation. I love to see people grow and develop their skills in all parts of life. I believe that’s why the Joomla Certification is very close to my heart.I’m very active in a couple of schools in Stockholm to help them outline what the new generation of developers would need to learn to be attractive in the marketplace. And to see the student succeed is just awesome.

As probably you might hear, in the following version of Joomla, some of unused defaults will be excluded. But if users need them separately, would it be possible to get those components from official repository or it would be better to use solutions from 3rd party developers?

As I understand it the Production Working Groups are going to make the extensions that they will exclude from upcoming versions available in a separate category on the JED. At the same time more users will look for alternatives to them now when they are not standard. That will be a new possibility for developers around the globe to develop something that would attract new users of the 3rd party developed extensions.

CMSGarden is a big exhibition of popular CMS. Which benefit does it give to Joomla globally?

That exhibition is very popular. And it is a good place for Joomla to show up and tell our story and showcase our solutions. There are many other exhibitions around the globe that I am also very curious on how Joomla can be able to attend and contribute. Just a couple of weeks ago I was representing Joomla together with Ruth Cheesley from CLT at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Phoenix, Arizona, where 8.000 people had the possibility to learn more about Joomla. I would love to know more about where you as a reader would like to see Joomla show up in your region. Please send me an email at sarah.watz@opensourcematters.org to tell me more about the exhibit, links to websites where there is more info and why you think it would be valuable for Joomla to show up there.

Does Joomla ideology change people’s mind and make them to be more open-minded? “All together as whole”.

I think a lot of people that are new to Open Source is looking for the catch. It’s too good to be true for a lot of people. How can people work for free, collaborate with people they don’t know and give a way knowledge and “secrets” to others?

Joomla is very different from many open source projects as we don’t have any paid staff. And there is a very distinctive love for Joomla and a very open minded way of collaborate to make a difference for others that attracts people and sometimes change there mindset to be more open minded. Especially when they realize that we create more and better things togheter that everyone can use than they would do by themselves.

I think most community members really get why Joomla is what it is and gets to tap into the awesome energy that we as volunteers create when we meet at an event. Face time is very important to nurture our network and our relationship with others so we then can collaborate more effectively when we “meet online”. And we have a lot of FUN at the same time as it is hard work to run the Joomla organization as we do together. Therefor Joomla is almost the second (or sometimes the first) family for many of our community members.

What challenges need to be overcome for Joomla in the near future and what are your expectations for 2015?

The landscape of web development tools is changing and evolving constantly. We need to not only follow but also understand that we have the capacity to lead the web development in the not to far away future. We have to stop comparing our solutions to others and find a way of defining our own way where others look and follow us. We have done it before and we can do it again and again and again. I truly believe in the initiative for change of how we work and how we are organized will enable us to do it better. To find a quick and easy way to get all the Joomla community members that would like to volunteer their time and energy started. To work more agile in smaller teams with more focus on user friendly deliverables. I believe the first 10 years of Joomla is only the start. Together we can do more than we can by ourselves. Together we can create awesomeness and have FUN doing it.

What would you wish to the readers of this interview?

I wish you could be brave enough to try new things together with new people to find new ways of doing things. To be disruptive in a world of constant change. As long as we try to make difference for the better it’s ok if we fail. Then we have feedback and can try again. Let’s keep on improving and learn on the way!

References:

• Sarah Watz in Linked-in