The mojoPortal community has been gradually growing along with the evolution of the project since late 2004. We have had quite a few contributors over the years such as Dean Brettle, who implemented NeatUpload, Joseph Hill, who implemented the initial version of Feed Manager (later improved by Walter Ferrari) as well as the initial data layers for PostgreSql and Sqlite, Rob Henry, who implemented the Survey, Christian Fredh, who implemented the Poll, and Kevin Needham who implemented the content workflow, and many others who contributed various little improvements over the years. You can find a list of contributors on our developer page for more detail. All the contributions and involvement have been pretty organic, we have never really organized project teams or a holistic strategy to grow and support the community. mojoPortal is now the 3rd most popular CMS on the ASP.NET stack and we are reaching a critical mass of popularity that I think requires us to get a little more organized. We are beginning to see more people helping out in the forums and more and more people are offering to help with development, but it is challenging for me to manage the community all by myself.
Today I would like to announce that Joe Davis will be stepping up to take on new responsibilities in the project as Community Manager. Joe has been a huge help to myself and the community already in the forums. He has helped a lot of people with skinning questions, installation and configuration questions, and lots of implementation tips and tricks to help others achieve their goals with mojoPortal. Joe mentioned to me a long time ago that one of the things that drew him toward mojoPortal was the friendly forums, we don't make people feel stupid for asking questions, there are no stupid questions. This is not to say that every question gets answered, most of them do but not all of them. Sometimes people ask questions for which we don't know the answer, or there isn't a good answer that comes to mind, or the amount of time required to answer it would be too much effort, or what I playfully would describe as "Wizard of Oz" questions. But by and large if people ask reasonable well articulated questions and we are able to help we do help. In his participation in the forums, Joe Davis has been exemplary in putting a friendly face on our forums and making people feel welcome. I mean just look at his mug shot, if you lookup "nice guy" in the dictionary there should be a mug shot of Joe Davis!
As Community Manager, Joe Davis will be able to help with forum moderation and logistics of managing the community, and he will collaborate with me on strategy to promote community engagement and how best to organize teams and contribution guidelines to facilitate development help offered by the community. As such we are in the beginning stages of working on the strategy and will be communicating more about that as our ideas begin to take shape. For now I just want to thank and congratulate Joe for stepping up to take on this role as a Core Team member and Community Manager.
Joe's company i7MEDIA provides high quality mojoPortal hosting and design services.
I also want to officially welcome Katherine Moss, who has joined our team as an Accessibility Advisor. Katherine will be instrumental in helping us keep mojoPortal accessible for users who use assistive technology such as screen readers. She will be helping with testing and feedback of various mojoPortal features in terms of their accessibility.
Follow us on twitter or become a fan on Facebook
