TYPO3 Eastern European conference
Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, was the location for the Eastern European TYPO3 conference. Some 100 people came together to participate in sessions about the TYPO3 project. Participants came from 7 countries with around 30 people coming from outside of Romania.
On Thursday the event started with a round table discussion at <link http: www.utcluj.ro>Universitatea Tehnica with participants from several Romanian universities and TYPO3 universities from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. In the afternoon there was a set of presentations at the <link http: www.ubbcluj.ro en>Babes-Bolyai University for students about a variety of topics.
The academic history of technology in Transylvania goes back almost a 100 years, to 1920 when the technical university of Cluj-Napoca was established.
The event really took of on Friday when all participants arrived. Rens Admiraal, Neos team member, started T3EE with “Neos, Challenging the Future. Rens was awarded as best speaker with a laptop made out of cake that would make <link http: www.tlc.com tv-shows cake-boss>cake boss himself jealous.
The event itself was characterized by the very warm and welcoming atmosphere the organization created. The amount of female developers/participants was higher then at any other TYPO3 event. The internet connection was top notch and of course we had a record 4 social events with the last one yesterday at the <link http: www.likealocalguide.com cluj-napoca fabrica-de-bere-ursus>Ursus Beer Factory.
Especially the dedication of Daniel Homorodean in leading this effort needs some special mention. Daniel scouted several TYPO3camps around Europe before organizing T3EE. I asked Daniel some question about Romania, IT and T3EE you wil lfind at the bottom of This Week in TYPO3.
TYPO3 CMS
The release of TYPO3 CMS 6.2 beta2 has been postponed, but preparation for the upcoming final release in December are in full swing. Since Monday, translations of the popular "TYPO3 CMS - What's New" slides have began and the TYPO3 community will not only profit from an English version as usual, but will be able to learn the new features, changes and improvements of the new TYPO3 LTS release in several languages. Currently we will have 9 translations. If you want to do a translation for your language then please contact <link>Michael Schams- Italian version: Roberto Torresani
- Russian version: Andrey Aksenov
- French version: Paul Blondiaux and Philippe Hérault
- Spanish version: Sergio Catalá and Michel Mix
- Dutch version: Ric van Westhreenen and Christiaan Wiesenekker
- Slovakian version: Michal Hadar
- Portuguese version: Abel Santolino Moreno
- Serbian version: Sinisa Mitrovic
- Swedish version: Robert Lindh
TYPO3 Neos
On November 12 <link http: typo3.org news article typo3-neos-10-beta-1-released>TYPO3 Neos 1.0 beta 1 was released. This first beta version is an important step towards the final release and contains most features of this much anticipated release. The editing interface, which had so much media attention the past weeks, has been improved and is still being refined. More and more agencies and freelancers have started using TYPO3 Neos – for both test and production.Team news
The server team meeting took place on the last weekend in Hamburg at <link http: www.e-net.info>e-net consulting. The team worked on many tasks, such as:- Improvements to server and service monitoring (now using Monit to monitor important services)
- Lots of improvements to the internal documentation
- Improvements and fixes to the Jenkins server, which is used by several community teams
- 1st time use of IPv6 for get.typo3.org (try it out!). It is planned to add IPv6 support to all other servers and websites in near future...
- Launch of an internal (Debian) software repository to distribute common tools
- Many discussions on how to improve the infrastructure even more
- and much more
TYPO3camps
As we are approaching the end of the year the activity surrounding the camps has come to a stand still and last week's <link http: www.typo3camp-rheinruhr.de>TYPO3camp RheinRuhr in Essen was the last one. The grapevine tells us that besides all the TYPO3camps we will have next year again, there might be TYPO3camps in Austria and the South of France as well.Daniel Homorodean about Romania, IT and T3EE
Daniel is the driving force behind TYPO3 Eastern Europe that was held from November 14 - 16 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Tell us a little bit about yourself
I am the CEO of <link http: www.arxia.com>Arxia, well established Romanian software agency focusing on value creation and believing that TYPO3 is the best framework to achieve this. Arxia is a founding member of <link http: www.clujit.ro>Cluj IT Cluster, a strong IT association aiming for the development of innovation and partnership culture in Romania. I am also co-founder of <link http: www.planningwiz.com>PlanningWiz, addicted to travel and to challenging constructive fights for a better world.
You talked about the road to T3EE in a session for the audience. Can you give a summary of that?
The Romanian TYPO3 community is the strongest in the Eastern Europe, both in numbers and in the ability to cooperate. We organize national meetups since 2010. In the autumn of 2012, we considered that we should move to the next level, to have an international event that would bring together the Eastern and Western European TYPO3 communities, to foster the cooperation, knowledge sharing and market share growth for TYPO3 in the Eastern Europe.
We have started the planning and promotion, at all the international TYPO3 events during 2013. We received great encouragement and support from the TYPO3 community and the TYPO3 Association, our call was answered by attendees from 7 countries, sponsors and speakers came to our help.
We have done a detailed investigation of the presence of TYPO3 in the Eastern Europe and engaged in conversation all the companies and freelancers that we could find. We have mapped the <link https: mapsengine.google.com map>TYPO3 presence in Eastern Europe and saw with surprise that TYPO3 has reached further that we thought initially to for instance Lebanon and Israel. Although not all the Eastern countries were present at T3EE 2013, we have the trust that from now it will be easier to engage and bring them all together, in the larger international TYPO3 community.
All the planning and organization of T3EE 2013 was a significant effort, carried with enthusiasm and resilience by the members of the TYPO3 Usergroup Romania.
As result of the successful first T3EE event, I believe that from now our value proposition will have more clarity for the Eastern European agencies and freelancers, who are not yet well exposed to the culture of community, and they will find easier the answer to the key question of “What is in for me from such an event” and will join in higher numbers the next editions.
How does the IT environment in Cluj look like?
Cluj-Napoca is an important academic centre ( with close to 100,000 students, at a stable population of 325,000 ), essential enabler to the strongest IT centre in all the region, with close to 10,000 software developers and a large number of companies, big and small, mostly working for the Western markets.
The IT companies and universities from Cluj realised that it is essential to establish and foster a partnership culture in the industry and this led to the creation of Cluj IT Cluster, an associative initiative that promotes the innovation as the way to generate sustainable value and change the perception about the Romanian IT services, from the former “cheap labour force” label to quality service providers and reliable partners.
In my session about innovation you mentioned the meetings you have in Cluj. Can you describe how you approach innovation yourself and how you deal with that in the meetings?
Innovation is the essential factor of evolution and the key for creating long lasting and growing economic and social value. Innovation comes from the anxiety to do more, to seek not how to adapt to the reality, but how to make our dreams become a reality and improve the life of us and all others.
The Eastern European space is traditionally more reactive and passive, complaining and waiting for things to happen, and we work hard to change this, to encourage the proactive approach and the trust that we can create a better future, working together. The Eastern IT market grew fast because of the outsourcing, but we cannot sustain much longer the “low price destination” assessment, as the costs do raise steadily, to match the Western EU countries Therefore our proposition has to be based on quality, high technical skill and ability to innovate through new products, value adding services and efficient processes.We are active, in Cluj IT Cluster and in other environments, in work groups working for the promotion of entrepreneurship in Romania, of fostering new ideas, sharing know-how, creating joint-ventures to create new products, promote good practices in the IT industry and efficient cooperation with the Universities and the public sector. We join regularly with our partners - other IT companies and the universities - to work on these topics and to learn from each other, and I have the trust that soon we will see a set of great start-ups and new products originating from Romania, aimed for the global market.