Joomla Leadership Team
At this time, the following people comprise the Joomla Leadership Team. This is a dynamic team made up of the leaders of the Joomla Production and the Joomla Community Workgroups. You can access the mailing lists of these teams using the following links:
Brad Baker
Location: Sydney, NSW, Australia
Timezone: GMT +9
Position: Joomla Community Leadership Team
URL: www.joomlatutorials.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/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.
Ken Crowder
Location: Omaha, Nebraska, USA
Timezone: GMT -6
Position: Joomla Community Leadership Team
Forum Profile: ChiefGoFor
Born in 1979, Ken grew up in a small town north of Kansas City, Missouri. He received his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Northwest Missouri State University in 2002.
Although Ken first discovered Mambo in 2003, he did not start using it extensively until early 2005. Since then, he has been working as a Senior Software Engineer at BIGSHOT, a full-service marketing and advertising agency located in Kansas City, Missouri. Prior to BIGSHOT, his experience includes places like Sprint and Hallmark.com.
Ken is currently writing a book for O'Reilly titled Using Joomla. It is due out at the end of the year.
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.
Christophe Demko
Location: La Rochelle, France, Europe
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Production Leadership Team
Forum Profile: chdemko
He was born in 1965 and now lives in France. He is currently an assistant professor of computer sciences at the University of La Rochelle (France, Europe). He passed his MA in 1989 and his Ph.D. in 1992. Influenced by the practice of judo from early childhood, he has endeavoured to apply one of its principles in the service of the free software community "Best use of energy and mutual welfare" (Jigoro Kano).
He created or improved several extensions for Joomla:
- HtmlMap Manager to use the map/area HTML tag couple linked to menu items
- Authentication Manager to use external authentication systems such as Centralized Authentication Server
- Localise to create new languages and translate strings for Joomla 1.6
- MediaWiki to share one mediawiki engine in several wikis for Joomla 1.6
He also contributed to Joomla's documentation (Hello World J!1.6 and Developing a Model-View-Controller Component for Joomla 1.6). Last, but not least, he now collaborates on the development of Joomla 1.6.
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.
Mark is a Bug Squad Coordinator, 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 has found the Joomla community to be incredibly friendly and welcoming and is excited about helping to make Joomla even better.
Andrew Eddie
Location: Toowoomba, Australia
Timezone: GMT + 10
Position: Production Leadership Team
URL: http://www.theartofjoomla.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AndrewEddie
Forum Profile: masterchief
Andrew Eddie is the owner of a small web consultancy based near Toowoomba, Australia and co-owner of the product solutions company JXtended which makes several free and commercial extensions for Joomla. While originally a civil engineer, he moved into the web application development field in 2000. Andrew has been involved in the open source software movement in professional, volunteer and leadership capacities since 2002. His most notable contributions have been with the project management system dotProject, the award winning content management system Mambo and currently with the award winning content management system Joomla, a project he co-founded. He has made minor contributions to other respected open source projects such as phpDocumentor and Phing.
Andrew speaks regularly in Australia and internationally, advocating the cost effectiveness of open source software and generally sharing his knowledge about how individuals and business can be empowered by using Joomla.
Alex Kempkens
Location: Munich, Germany
Timezone: GMT +2
Position: currently in-active
URL: ThinkNetwork.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/akempkens
Born and raised in Munich Alex is working as a corporate consultant today. One of this working fields is the usage of Open Source Solutions, concepts and techniques within todays corporate processes. As a developer he joined the Mambo/Joomla core/development team in 2004 and was working as events and communications lead recently. His book about the Joomla development is published in 2009 and within the Joomla community he works as lead developer for Joomla's multilingual extension Joom!Fish (www.joomfish.net). In his vision Joomla will enable many more people to create websites and share information with others.
Louis Landry
Location: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
Timezone: GMT -6
Position: Production Leadership Team : Developer
URL: jxtended.com
Louis, 28, of New Orleans, Louisiana, works in Web development and holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Louisiana Tech University. His first experience with computers was playing on a 286 with Basic at his father's office. Louis has programmed in many languages, ranging from low level x86 assembly to managed languages like Java and scripting languages like PHP. He was a founding member of his university's robotics team. Louis is a car nut, and enjoys working on them in his spare time.
Ian MacLennan
Location: Toronto, Canada, North America
Timezone: GMT -5
Position: Production Leadership Team
Forum Profile: ianmac
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ian_maclennan
Ian joined the Joomla Project shortly after startup in 2005 and volunteered to work with the Developer Documentation project. Since then, he has become more involved with the project and has served in various roles, including GSoC mentor and administrator, developer documentation team leader, Joomla Bug Squad coordinator and Development Working Group Member.
He looks forward to the future as the Joomla community works together to further the goal of being a flexible platform for digital publishing and collaboration.
Peter Martin
Location: Nijmegen, The Netherlands, Europe
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: www.db8.nl
Forum Profile: pe7er
Twitter: http://twitter.com/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.
Sam Moffatt
Location: Toowomba, Australia
Timezone: GMT +10
Position: Development Coordinator
URL: pasamio.id.au
Sam, 20, of Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, is the youngest member of the development team. He is currently studying IT and has been working with Mambo (now Joomla) since early 2004. His work came to the fore with the Google SOC and his update system, which will be further developed and included in Joomla. Sam also authors the JAuthTools project, which provides LDAP support for Joomla 1.0 and 1.5.
Ole Bang Ottosen
Location: Hillerød, Denmark, Europe
Timezone: GMT +1
Position: Community Leadership Team
URL: www.joomla.dk
Forum Profile: ot2sen
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ot2sen
Ole, 42 of Hillerød, Denmark, works professionally as a Joomla! solutions provider since 2004.
He joined Joomla at the project birth in 2005 and voluntered to help moderate the International forums and became local Danish Translation Coordinator. Was invited to help build the Joomla! Extensions Directory in late 2005, and enjoyed the many hours of serious work and fun at the JED Editorial Team until he retired in early 2008. He joined the Core Team in 2007 when invited to take on the position as Joomla! Translation Coordinator. Was representing language matters in the Production Leadership from 2009-2010, and switched to Community Leadership in January 2010 for to better represent language matters in a community context.
Ron Severdia
Location: San Francisco, CA
Timezone: GMT -8
Position: Production Leadership Team
URL: Kontent Design
Forum Profile: severdia
Twitter: http://twitter.com/severdia
Ron Severdia is a Creative Director of Kontent Design, a leading design agency 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, 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 7 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 recently redesigned the new look of the Joomla family of websites and is a member of the Kunena Forum team. He authored Using Joomla book for O'Reilly. He is the founder of the Joomla-based Shakespeare site, PlayShakespeare.com and the Modern Shakespeare Company.
Jean-Marie Simonet
Location: South of France
Timezone: GMT +2
URL: info-graf.fr
Jean-Marie was born a long time ago in France. He received a very classic education and got married a few times. He was a former news reporter from 1969 to 1985 and, wearing multiple hats (NHK TV, Gamma, freelance for many magazines), he focused on post-colonial conflicts (Africa, Middle-East, Central America) as well as social conflicts in Europe.
He moved to Sonoma, California (1985-1992) and worked there as an advertising photographer, specializing in the wine industry. He got addicted to an Apple IIC in the mid-eighties and started computer designing, as well as beta-testing. He now owns a one-man computer graphic and web design in France.