Joomla Leadership Team

Joomla Leadership Team

The leadership of Joomla consists of three teams:

• Production Leadership Team (PLT): responsible for coordinating the production of the Joomla CMS and Platform, including code, documentation, and localization.
• Community Leadership Team (CLT): responsible for all Joomla websites, forums, and user groups.
• Open Source Matters (OSM): responsible for managing all legal and financial affairs for Joomla and also the Joomla demo sites.

You can access the mailing lists of these teams using the following links:

• Production Leadership Team
• Community Leadership Team
• Entire Leadership Team

Members of the PLT and CLT are listed below. See the OSM Website for a list of the OSM Board members.

Michael Babker

Location:  Clarksville, Tennessee, USA
Timezone: GMT – 6
Position: Production Leadership Team 
URL: http://www.babdev.com/
Forum Profile: mbabker
Twitter: @mbabker

Michael has been developing using Joomla! since 2010, coming to the Bug Squad shortly after the first 1.6 Beta. In the time since, he has gone from being a user of the product with no programming experience to writing code for the CMS and Platform, either in the form of extensions or core contributions.

Suprisingly, developing code is just a hobby for him. His day job sees him work in the IT field primarily in help desk and network management roles, skills he brings back to his Joomla contributions while interacting on the tracker or mailing lists. Always seeking a challenge and learning, Michael holds an Associate of Arts in Information Technology with a concentration in Web Design as well as other technical certifications spread throughout the IT field.

When not paying the bills or writing code, Michael can be found enjoying the scenery wherever he's at in the world, seeking   new challenge, and all in all enjoying life.

Brad Baker

Location: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Timezone: GMT +9
Position: Joomla Community Leadership Team
URL: www.joomlatutorials.com
Twitter: @xyzulu

Born and raised in South Africa, now living in Australia's biggest city, Sydney.

Brad has years of experience in the web hosting industry. As well as running his own local Web hosting and design business, he has been working for Rochen (www.rochen.com) for a number of years. He's been associated with the project since 2003, and brings his good humor and expertise to the ever-growing Joomla fold. Like many of us, he has succumbed to the hazards of the job and, after years of wearing out keyboards, his handwriting is illegible and spelling deplorable without the use of a spellchecker.

Isidro Baquero

Location: Seville, Spain, Europe 
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: http://www.gnumla.com
Forum Profile: hefesto
Twitter: @isidrobaq

Born and living in Seville, south of Spain, Isidro met web technologies for the first time while studying telecommunications engineering in the early 2000s. He was so cautivated by the www that he finally left his studies to work full time as a web freelancer (site building, webmaster, community manager, english to spanish translations).

Related with Joomla since Mambo days, he owns a blog about Joomla in spanish (www.gnumla.org). He started collaborating actively with the Joomla project during early 2010, when joined the moderator team as local moderator for the spanish forum. After that, he continued to increase his involvement, joining JPeople community managers team and the JCM as Spanish editor during 2010, and becoming JPeople Communications Manager during 2011. Also, during the summer of 2011, he joined the Joomla Tweet Team and the Spanish Translation Team.

Ruth Cheesley

Location: United Kingdom, Europe
Timezone: GMT
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: www.viryatechnologies.com 
Forum Profile: RCheesley
Twitter: @RCheesley

Ruth has always been a passionate supporter of free and open source software, and came across Joomla! in the early days when asked to design a website during her time as IT Technician at a school, and the rest, as they say, is history! She now runs a business - Virya Technologies and Virya Software - which specialises in Open Source technologies including Joomla! website design, management and extension creation, and Linux server management. Her personal area of interest lies within search engine optimisation and helping websites to recover from poor SEO practices. Ruth also founded Joomla! User Group Suffolk and is on the team for Joomla!Day UK events.

When she's not in front of a computer screen she can be found lurking in the countryside assessing young people completing their Duke of Edinburgh's Expedition or hunting out geocaches. She's also training for ordination with the Triratna Buddhist Community and is a field hockey goalkeeper.

Chris Davenport

Location: Shrewsbury, Shropshire, United Kingdom
Timezone: GMT
Position: Documentation Working Group Coordinator

Born 1958, Chris first began programming on a DEC PDP8 in 1975. He gained a degree in mathematics in 1979 and, after a brief spell as a mathematician in the aerospace industry, got sucked into the rapidly growing computer industry. Chris has developed software at all levels from assembly language upwards, on everything from microprocessors to mainframes, and has learnt through hard experience the value of good, disciplined commenting and thorough documentation. "Documentation is as much a part of the finished product as the code itself."

He discovered Mambo in 2003 while searching for a content management system for an intranet project. Although impressed by the product itself, he felt that the lack of documentation was a major weakness. Rather than complaining, he set about trying to fix the problem by writing his own and was soon recruited to the Documentation Team. He switched to Joomla as soon as the split occurred and is now responsible for developer documentation.

Mark Dexter

Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Timezone: GMT – 8
Position: Production Leadership Team, Bug Squad Coordinator
Forum Profile: dextercowley

Mark started writing software in the 1970s on punch cards and, for 28 years, co-owned and ran a company that develops software for construction companies. During this time, he did everything from design and development to support, training, and documentation.

After retiring in 2007, Mark decided to learn more about open source software. After becoming the webmaster for a small non-profit organization, he discovered Joomla and started using version 1.5.2 in early 2008. He made the mistake of pressing the Help button and discovered that most of the help documentation hadn't been written yet. So he volunteered to write documentation and has continued to learn about Joomla and try to contribute to the project.

In the Joomla project, Mark is currently a Bug Squad Coordinator, a Development Coordinator, and the Administrator for the Joomla Student Outreach Program (JSOP). He has been a moderator on the forums, a member of the Documentation working group, and the Administrator for the 2009 Google Summer of Code program. He also has written four extensions.

Mark is especially interested in the area of automated testing using PHPUnit and Selenium. Mark has found the Joomla community to be incredibly friendly and welcoming and is excited about helping to make Joomla even better.

Peter Martin

Location: Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Europe
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: www.db8.nl 
Forum Profile: pe7er
Twitter: @pe7er

Like millions of others, Peter's computer career began in 1984 with the Commodore 64. Ten years later he got hooked to the Internet during his studies Marketing and Mass Communication. When plain HTML wasn't sufficient anymore he learned PHP/MySQL. In 2003 Peter discovered Mambo CMS but only got actively involved in the Joomla community in 2005 when he started helping other users at Joomla forum. Peter has been a forum Moderator since 2006 & Global Moderator since 2007.

Peter is an avid music collector, especially vinyl records, he loves art house movies and facts (trivia). Peter has his own business db8 (founded in 2005) which offers Joomla website implementation, support and development of Joomla extensions.

Olaf Offick

Location: Galway, Ireland, Europe
Timezone: GMT
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: http://www.learn-skills.org
Forum Profile: ooffick

Olaf is an Internet Engineer (M.Sc.) working in Galway, Ireland. He is the founder of Learn Skills, a company providing high quality Learning Management Systems (LMS / LCMS / VLE) and Educational Materials to businesses, schools and government organisations. In the Joomla community, Olaf is working in the Joomla Global Moderator Team and the Joomla Forum Administrator Team.

Sander Potjer

Location: Weesp, The Netherlands, Europe 
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: http://www.sanderpotjer.nl
Forum Profile: zanderp
Twitter: @sanderpotjer

Sander’s Joomla passion started back in 2005 by building a Joomla website for his rowing team. Next to his studies Architecture at Delft University of Technology Sander is a Joomla freelancer working on all kinds of Joomla projects.

The involvement with the Joomla community started back in 2008, as co-founder of the local Dutch communitywww.joomlacommunity.eu. In a short period they established a solid community with an active team of volunteers. The volunteers contribute by providing news, translations, documentation, forum support and by organization the Joomla User Groups (14 in a small country!) and the yearly Dutch JoomlaDays.

He is chairman of “Stichting Sympathy,” a Dutch foundation founded in January 2011 that covers all Joomla activities and promoting the Joomla project in The Netherlands.

Nick Savov

Location:  Iowa, USA
Timezone: GMT – 6
Position: Production Leadership Team 
URL: http://www.ostraining.com/
Forum Profile: NickSavov
Twitter: @NickSavov

Nick Savov has been involved with Joomla for about two and a half years and web related work for only three years. He's a quick learner and enjoys learning new things by applying himself until a goal is accomplished. During his time with Joomla, he's been involved in a lot of areas of the project including documentation, Joomla Bug Squad, marketing, communication, and helping out on the developer mailing lists and the forum.

One of his favorite parts about Joomla is meeting other people in the community, getting to know them better, and working with them to accomplish common goals. He especially loves helping others to learn something new, to solve problems, and to contribute to the Joomla core.

Nick's employed at OSTraining, as the Director of Sites, where he's helped answer thousands of Joomla-related questions. As part of the job, he also gets to work with Joomla and Joomla-related products throughout the day. Having those opportunities and his colleagues as co-workers has made the position a dream job for him.

Ron Severdia

Location: San Francisco, CA
Timezone: GMT -8
Position: Production Leadership Team
URL: PlayShakespeare.com
Forum Profile: severdia
Twitter: @severdia

Ron Severdia is CTO of Metrodigi, a leading eBook company in the San Francisco Bay Area and has directed interactive branding projects—from websites and brand identities to interactive campaigns—for clients such as HP, Verizon, Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, Visa, Walmart.com, eBay, and Apple. His prior experience includes stints as a Senior Designer and then Creative Director at Young & Rubicam, DDB, Glow, and Landor Associates. Fluent in several languages, he worked for seven years in Europe, where he won a Euro-Effie award for his creative work with Schweppes.

Ron has been using Joomla since 2006 to build sites for companies, large and small, including a worldwide branding site for Citibank. He is a member of the Kunena Forum team and he authored the Using Joomla book for O'Reilly Media. He is the founder of the Joomla-based Shakespeare site, PlayShakespeare.com.

Andrea Tarr

Location: Belchertown, MA
Timezone: GMT -5
Position: Production Leadership Team
URL: Tarr Consulting
Twitter: @Tarrconsulting

Andy started programming when she was a librarian back in the late 70s. She took home a self-study guide to the IBM System-32/34 and wrote the first computerized circulation system in the state of New Hampshire.

She became deeply involved with Joomla as part of the Google Summer of Code 2009 and wrote the accessible Administrator template Hathor.

Now Andy uses Joomla with her clients because it gives clients a maintainable website that is easy to customize and extend. She specializes in understanding the customers' business needs and using her analytical & programming skills to fulfill those needs. She is the author of PHP and MySQL 24-Hour Trainer.