In mid-October, I attended my first jQuery Foundation boarding meeting. In case you missed the news, we announced in early September that the Dojo Foundation and jQuery Foundation are merging. The primary goal of this open source foundation union is to encourage greater collaboration between open source web projects, and also provide a home for other open source JavaScript and web projects. Our board of eleven members got together in New York City and met for about eight hours to cover a number of topics. It was great to meet a number of people from the board in person for the first time. It was also great to reaffirm how much we have in common, and to learn more about how we can help!

For this meeting, the board primarily focused on what we can do to best help open source projects that are looking to join a foundation. We currently have the following projects:

  • jQuery projects including Core, Sizzle, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, jQuery Mouse Wheel Plugin
  • Dojo Toolkit
  • Intern and QUnit for testing
  • PEP (Pointer Events Polyfill), JED and Globalize (internationalization), to encourage and support standards
  • CSS-Chassis to encourage cross-project widget class name and markup consistency
  • Esprima, Grunt, lo-dash, and RequireJS, tools that greatly improve JS infrastructure
  • Tessel, an open hardware and software platform
  • Persevere, DWR, OpenCoWeb, Zazzle, projects that provide useful server-side capabilities

We really have a great family of projects covering many different areas of JavaScript development. This merger presented us with a good opportunity to take a step back, evaluate, and make sure we’re doing everything we can for our projects, as well as the good organizations that choose to sponsor our efforts! We’re also working on a new name which we hope to finalize soon.

I look forward to working with the jQuery Foundation to continue providing an excellent home for our projects and those yet to join, and to help foster and preserve a truly open web ecosystem. If you have a project and would like more information about the foundation, or if you would like to sponsor our efforts at the foundation, please let us know!