By Tess Gadwa

This article originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of The Commons.

The sun is shining on the last Saturday in May, as just over 100 people scramble for a spot on the grass bordering the Marlboro College Graduate Center parking lot in downtown Brattleboro.  Lack of outdoor seating is one of the few indicators that the Joomla!Day New England is a homegrown event, organized by volunteers.  So far the sold-out event has run smoothly. Attendees have come from Boston and Quebec, as well as rural Vermont and the Pioneer Valley. They mingle and talk shop excitedly, balancing plates of barbecue on their laps.

Kristen Wilson, a dark-haired woman in an orange-flowered shirt, is delighted when a neighbor can quickly answer her question about creating menu links. She is here to learn more about the open-source web technology known as Joomla!

“The community behind Joomla is gigantic,” says Wilson, owner of Sun Spot Graphics in Jamaica, Vermont. “It allows for so much creativity.”

Over the past two years, web designers have been quietly switching to Joomla and other Content Management System (CMS) tools. Content management allows users to edit and update their own websites, with no knowledge of HTML or programming required. Third-party extensions add e-commerce, social networking and blog features, multimedia, contacts management, and virtually any other web feature imaginable. Best of all, the software is free.

“I just love that it’s open-source. Most of my clients are small businesses, so they need an affordable solution,” says Anne Campbell, a web designer based in Shelburne Falls, MA.

A technically savvy end-user can install a Joomla site with a pre-existing template in a matter of hours -- paying only the cost for web hosting. Even a custom-designed site is typically no more expensive than the previous generation of static HTML websites. The difference is that rather than being dependent on an outside designer, clients can make changes themselves, using a simple web-based interface. For small businesses and nonprofits -- who lack dedicated IT staff but frequently need to update their sites to reflect sales, specials, news, and events -- the technology can be truly liberating.

Bed and breakfast owner Lynda Graham, of Sutton, Quebec, built her village’s tourism website, www.infosutton.com, with the help of an initial Joomla consultant. “We knew nothing about web development. I’ve become a huge fan of Joomla,” says Graham. Now she and three other women are able to update the site’s event and restaurant listings weekly, at no additional expense.

Open Source

Like many such systems, the Joomla software is free, open-source software developed by a cadre of volunteers worldwide who share their work with the world.

If this business model sounds different from your standard hot new tech trend, there is a reason. Joomla (Swahili for “all together”) is produced, maintained, and distributed not by a corporation, but by a global movement encompassing thousands of volunteers. According to Sam Moffat of www.joomla.org, the site reached 10 million downloads mark last week. Clients using Joomla include MTV, Al Gore, the United Nations, and Citibank. The alpha release of version 1.6 is due out at the end of June.

How is this possible? No one has a single answer.

The open-source software movement, which allows users to freely distribute and modify a program’s underlying source code, has produced some stunning successes -- most notably the Linux operating system and Apache, the most popular web server software in the world. Yet Linux and Apache hold appeal for only the most technically sophisticated of users. Open-source CMS platforms such Drupal and Plone offer more robust features than Joomla in some areas, but require a steeper learning curve.

“Nobody had ever tried to build a CMS before that was easy to use,” says Joomla project co-founder Mitch Pirtle, a speaker at the Brattleboro event.

Usability is more than a point of pride within the Joomla community. It is the community’s defining feature. Online and offline, hardcore techies mingle with graphic designers, marketing professionals, and ordinary people who never dreamed of touching a line of code. The Joomla website estimates the global community at 20,000 users and contributors. More than just a fan club, the community provides documentation, bug checking, online support forums, and technical enhancements on a scale comparable to commercial-grade software.

 “Humans are inclined to collaborate,” says Joomla core team developer Rob Schley, who traveled from New Orleans to speak at the Brattleboro event. “We’re social beings. We want to work together. We want to learn.”

 When asked what motivates talented programmers to forego highly paid jobs and put their time into open source instead, Schley cites the appeal and challenge of the work, as well as programmers’ ideal of freedom of information.  He acknowledges that the project has faced challenges from scheduling and internal politics, but is optimistic about the movement’s long-term future.

“It’s really special because it’s really community-driven. That’s very different from the benevolent dictator model,” says Elin Waring, a sociologist at the City University of New York who also serves as president of Open Source Matters, the nonprofit managing financial, legal and organizational issues for the Joomla! project. “We want enterprise users and we want grandmothers.”

She notes that Joomla is the CMS of choice for developing countries. “What open source is about is sharing. That ‘all together’ idea -- people really take it seriously.”

A Regional Hub

Brattleboro has become a regional hub for this technology, in large part due to the efforts of web developer Jen Kramer McKibben, founder of the New England Joomla User Group, director of the Information Technology program at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, and organizer of the day’s event.

 “By teaching people what you know, not only do you learn it better, you strengthen your community,” says McKibben. “People ask me, ‘Why are you training your competitors?’ I don’t see it that way. We pass each other work.”

At present, the Joomla economy is not built on venture capital funding or Silicon Valley glitz, but sole proprietors and small shops like McKibben’s 4Web or Barrie North’s Joomlashack of Norwich, VT. Many customers are local as well -- farms, small businesses, and nonprofits. Technology professionals earn their livelihood from a software platform that never gained a stock symbol or sold a single copy.

The Joomla movement offers an intriguing balance between the motives for cooperation and for profit, between building global communities and local ones. The implications are larger than the next release. If 20,000 volunteers can work together across the world to build commercial-grade software, what else can they accomplish?

As we finish our lunch outside, an Amtrak train rumbles by on the tracks below.

“There is such a huge amount of creative energy up and down this valley,” Wilson tells me. “I hope it lasts.”