Always look on the bright side of life

A community becomes a community when people share the same goals, the same values and have a common ground, which creates a sense of belonging for all. We want to share, have fun, inspire and foster our beloved product - we are friends - we are part of the community. People sometimes ask what the community is to us: It’s everybody who - in whatever way - is engaged in TYPO3: a user, a company, a developer, you name it. When it can say 'TYPO3', it’s a community member. At a certain point when a community evolves, it has to split into smaller parts/teams with not necessarily the bigger picture in mind. Socially things can become complicated. People have best intentions when trying to solve problems and sometimes it’s difficult to act in a way that does not demotivate. At that point work needs to be done to solve those issues.
All credits for this pic go to the one and only Søren Schaffstein The role of our community manager is to keep an overview, connect people, to stimulate the communication between teams, to make sure communication happens at all and in this way contribute to progress in the TYPO3 community. The community manager is there for the TYPO3 community as someone to consult with with any community related issues. Over and above we need a group taking care for enhancing community diversity, interaction and motivation. Several Open Source projects have a team that is focused on the social aspects. Sometimes called Community Working Group or Community Counsel. Ben van ‘t Ende as community manager, Benni Mack and Christian Müller, as community contacts for respectively the CMS and Neos teams and Gina Steiner as former vice president of the TYPO3 Association developed a personal itch to foster community diversity, interaction and motivation. Which resulted in formation of the Community Working Group (CWG). In a body as large as the TYPO3 project, conflict is inevitable. Often conflict is simply a result of several parties trying to contribute with best intentions but disagreeing on details. The CWG can help to resolve such conflicts if necessary, enable teams to learn from each other and it supports the community in applying the TYPO3 Community Code of Conduct as a guideline for their contributions. Our vision for the CWG is a group of community members who come together based on merit, meaning contributions they made earlier to the social dynamics of the TYPO3 community. Obviously there is need for guidelines for being part of this group and we will review the members once in a while if they are active and still enthusiastic about it. These kind of guidelines are true for any group/team and it could or would be a good occasion to write such guidelines for teams in general. It is not about rules, but about guidelines. We also want to work without any budget from the TYPO3 Association for the time being. The Community Working Group will focus on the following topics:

• Team Communication/Interaction
• Motivation
• <link>Code of Conduct
• Diversity
• Happiness
• Values like trust, openness, sharing and inspiring (guarding 'Inspiring People To Share')?

We invite you to discuss our idea and leave as many comments as possible!