This year I have been fortunate to travel and speak about Joomla in 13 countries across almost all the continents on the planet. One thing I quickly learned is that despite increasing globalistaion and harmonisation we are all different.
I've written before about the obvious differences of language but there's much more too it than that. Local culture and economics play an important part as well in defining and differentiating the Joomla communities around the world.
In India I observed an overwhelming hunger for knowledge, especially coding, to enable people to support others with specific parts of their web site. In The Netherlands and Spain I mainly met professional web site builders who supply complete web sites for their clients and were looking to share knowledge and develop and maintain social networks with like minded people. In Bosnia we partied.
What we share
- Passion for the work we do
- Thirst for knowledge
- Hunger to learn and improve
- Desire to share our expertise and experience
- Love for joomla and the opportunities it provides
Lessons learned
- English is not the only language in the world
- Reliable and fast internet access can not be assumed
- Access to affordable, fast, well configured web servers with unlimited disk space is not universal
- Features that are essential in one part of the globe are useless in another
- The open source argument may not be an issue for some but is still a hurdle for others
- Joomla satisfies the needs of a wide variety of users
Joomla is not about software it is about relationships.
Joomla tries to be a one-size fits all CMS and that's not easy to be.
We've done alot to make it that way; with the ability to extend the CMS with thousands of extensions, be native in over 50 languages and run on almost any type of server. Now we have to continue the work to make sure that we have the tools necessary to move forward and become a single global community where the ability to speak English isn't a requirement and that Joomla can be a place called home no matter what you use it for.
Today Joomla is many communities. Let's all work together so that next year Joomla! really can be one community.
