It's official... Open Source Matters is all together now! The new OSM board members were nominated and elected last month at the Software Freedom Law Center, in New York City. Please put your hands together for the Open Source Matters Board of 2007!

• Elin Waring - President
• Ryan Ozimek - Secretary
• Shayne Bartlett - Treasurer
• Chris Justice - Board Member
• Joe Orr - Board Member
• Johan Janssens - Board Member
• James Vasile - Board Member and Mentor, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).

Open Source Matters, Inc. exists to provide an administrative umbrella for legal and financial support for the Joomla! project and to ensure Joomla! exists beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and funds and to provide protection for limiting legal exposure while participating in Open Source software projects.

The Joomla! core team has put considerable effort into realising a new structure for the board of directors.  Nominations were proposed by the board and those nominees were supported by the core team. This structure provides separation of responsibilities, allowing coders to code and board members to effect administrative responsibilities.

Joomla! software powers millions of websites world-wide.  It is used by some of the busiest and content rich commercial, government and non-government agencies, education and general user sites around the world.  Some examples include the United Nations (www.unric.org), Porsche (www.porsche.com.br), Eurovision Song Contest (www.eurovision.tv), Professional Rock Stars (www.professionalrockstars.com) to name just a few.

The Joomla! community — in the form of forum participants — is fast approaching 100,000 users.  Also, Joomla's third-party-developer community is unique.  It provides a melting pot of talented coders releasing both free and commercial extensions.  The thousands of extensions they make available is surely one of the most appealing things about the Joomla! project. Put simply, you can make Joomla! fit almost any niche Internet content publishing need.  Joomla! can be mainstream or it can be highly specialised in its deployment.

The project supports numerous events around the world where people can learn more about what Joomla! does, how to use it to best effect and how to participate.  Joomla! has been involved in Google's Summer of Code project since its inception.  This has seen the mentoring and identification of many talented developers who have contributed to the project.

Since its "birth" in September 2005, Joomla! has enjoyed amazing popularity generated by the flexibility and freedom of choice Open Source software provides.  The project has seen frequent releases of of its landmark 1.0 codebase (with bug and security fixes) while the core team has been driving a complete refactoring of code to create the next generation Joomla! 1.5.

This year will see the 1.5 Beta taken through further quality control and made ready for its first stable release.  This release sees Joomla! mature into one of the most exciting Open Source frameworks to hit the Internet.

2007 will be a big year for the Joomla! team and now with the formation of Joomla's foundation complete, the future looks very promising indeed.