Selection of First Major Event

Monday, 05 April 2010 00:15

In November 2009, Open Source Matters (OSM) put out a request for proposal (RFP) to the Joomla! community, asking teams of community members to provide proposals for what will be the first round of major, worldwide events officially supported by OSM. In the RFP, OSM looked for a variety of characteristics that would make these unique events a success, in a effort to outline measures of success for this new type of event.

This process has been quite different from the typical process that OSM has undertaken for Joomla!Days. A major event is, well, major: an international gathering bringing together up to 1,200 people to a professionally managed event. Attracting the Joomla! community's users, implementers, and developers from around the world, these major events have a wonderful opportunity to further build bridges within the Joomla! community.

Our goal in this proposal process was to directly engage with the community to find the right teams that could receive the full support of OSM to manage these important events.

The process attracted the interest of six fantastic teams from around the world. Of these initial six teams, four provided OSM with proposals detailing their ideas for a major Joomla! event.

Melbourne, Australia
Toledo, Spain
Rome, Italy
Mallorca, Spain

Through a review of each of the proposals, we have been able to make a decision for the first host city for this new series of major events: Melbourne, Australia!

We have been working with the Melbourne team during the past few weeks to move forward quickly for an event in November 2010, and the team has been doing a fantastic job getting the ball rolling forward successfully. During the next few weeks, we'll be providing more information about the event, detailing dates, location, and more.

We'd like to thank each of the local community teams for their hard work in putting together their proposals for these new events. We've been in touch with each team, and look forward to the opportunity to work with them in the future.