Written by: Lasse Fredslund
In the DNA of Umbraco is a close relationship with the community. Umbraco is Open Source and benefits from input, contributions, and general help from developers, technical writers, QAs, marketeers, partners, and a lot of other friendly people from the community. On a daily basis, we learn and grow through comments and discussions with users, partners, MVPs, and other friends of Umbraco - whether it’s on Discord, Slack, Local Meetups, “Retreats”, Codegarden, other events, or old fashioned onsite visits. We believe we have the friendliest Open Source community on the planet - and we highly value this community because we know how much we can learn from listening to it. Now, we want to learn even more through a new community team focusing on how we can improve the Umbraco CMS experience.
Umbraco has grown quite a lot through the last couple of years and we have more than doubled the number of employees within the last three years. That clearly shows in the increased number of development teams and developers now at Umbraco HQ, bringing more hands on deck to the CMS and our SaaS services.
In relation to this, the need to ensure that we develop on what adds the most value to customers and users has increased, and we have therefore intensified our focus on product management. As part of this, we have hired two Product Owners: Søren Aamand Jørgensen, who’s the PO for Umbraco Cloud, and me, Lasse Fredslund, who’s the PO for the Umbraco CMS. With dedicated POs, we are now able to prioritize initiatives that foster further inclusion of the community - the new CMS community team is an example of this.
We’ve already started up an internal stakeholder group with colleagues from more or less all departments within Umbraco HQ but there is nothing like getting input straight from the horse’s mouth. And that is where we would like your, your colleague, or other relevant Umbraco stakeholders’ input.
We would like to know about your pains and gains, but also like to hear your input on ideas, roadmap items, features/implementations, and the overall CMS Strategy in general. The team will work as a sounding board which means that, unlike previous Umbraco community teams, the focus will not be on you contributing via code or technical solutions but rather through your knowledge and insights as an Umbraco stakeholder.
We plan to meet on a regular basis 4 times a year and will run it fully virtual with respect to potential different time zones of the participants. In contrast to previous community teams, we don’t expect you to produce anything - only that we can rely on you showing up for the 4 meetings every year and that you’ll bring your opinions and knowledge to the table.
The topic of the first meeting will be the CMS Roadmap as it looks today followed by an in-depth discussion about how to handle and communicate breaking changes.
The meetings will be facilitated by the Umbraco CMS group manager Bjarke Berg and me, the Umbraco CMS Product Owner, Lasse Fredslund.
As opinions diverge between organizations, countries, and professions we would like to see a broad mix of people in this new community team to ensure we cover as many aspects as possible. So, if you represent an agency, a customer, a technology partner, a content editor, or a group of developers - maybe as an MVP - we’ll encourage you to let us know your interest through the application form below.
The application closes on May 10, 2022 (at 4 pm CEST). Shortly thereafter, we hope to be able to welcome 8-10 diverse members of the CMS community team - maybe you?
If you have any questions about this community team feel free to reach out to community@umbraco.com.
Umbraco Deploy has some exciting new features underway and you can try them out in the new release candidate. There’s also a big update on Umbraco Heartcore, a goodbye to an old friend, and many new updates to the product roadmap 🐣