Association Recap 2018

Categories: Association
The work the TYPO3 Association does mostly goes on in the background and is not as visible as development related tasks and milestones. But we are proud to be able to reflect on a solid list of achievements for 2018. Over the course of last year, the board had 21 regular board meetings and four Quarterly Summits. Our last in-person meet was back in October in Berlin, Germany. Here is an insight into this meeting and our work in 2018:

QSA #4 2018 in Berlin

The quarterly summit of the TYPO3 Association (QSA) took place the day before the TYPO3 conference. We met in the nhow hotel in Berlin and seized the opportunity to get in touch with our community and members during the TYPO3 conference the following day.

State of the TYPO3 Association

The first topic of the day was a discussion between the board and Tymoteusz Motylewski, a member of the TYPO3 core team. Tymoteusz provided his outside perspective on various topics including marketing, market share outside the DACH region and decision-making processes within the TYPO3 project. It was a very productive discussion with a positive exchange of ideas. An important conclusion for the board was that we need to be more transparent about who is responsible for which areas and how decision-making processes work.

Budget Process and Management

Next on the agenda was the joint work on the documentation and improvement of the budget process and management of the budgets throughout the year. We created more user stories for the reimbursement tool and worked on the documentation together.

Invoices & Dunning for TYPO3 Association Memberships

The third agenda point concerned the dunning process for unpaid TYPO3 Association memberships, which is very time-consuming. We tried to improve the process and discussed possibilities to take legal action against members who have unpaid invoices.

Election of the Board in 2019

Due to the merge of the Expert Advisory Board (EAB) into the board, we will have a full election at the next General Assembly which will take place on 9 April 2019. We discussed who might be open for re-election and collected the names of possible candidates we would like to approach.

GDPR

We were able to conclude that most of our GDPR tasks are done. The collaboration with Karen Falkenberg has worked well and Olivier and Stefan implemented an effective workflow regarding user deletion requests. Karen continues to check our services and consult us in all questions concerning GDPR.

What we achieved in 2018

Last year we were able to implement important changes for the TYPO3 Association. The General Assembly accepted the proposal of the board to implement a new structure for the TYPO3 Association. These changes (https://typo3.org/article/on-the-way-to-a-leaner-more-transparent-association/) will take place in April 2019.

Further successful projects:

  • Improved the communication workflow between Association and TYPO3 GmbH
  • Introduced "This Month in TYPO3" feature on typo3.org
  • Implemented the relaunch of typo3.org
  • Created a social media editors group
  • Introduced a regular newsletter for TYPO3 Association Members and a Content Team
  • Extended the TYPO3 trademark registration to China and prolonged and expanded our Swiss trademark registration to more categories
  • Handled 25 trademark violations mostly related to domains or usage of our trademark in any other way that we do not allow
  • Ran four official events (TYPO3 Developer Days, Certifuncation, TYPO3 Conference, TYPO3 Academic Days)

Outlook 2019

We already have a lot of ideas and projects for this year. We want to focus on the following areas:

  • Self-service functions for the members & community: We need this in order to scale our administration and to improve the service for all community members
  • Membership campaign: We need a strong member base to support the many projects in our community
  • Internationalization: We want to strengthen our community outside the DACH Region and simultaneously foster the usage of our product in these regions. We see great opportunity in North America, Africa and India.

We hope this update brings you well up to speed on the past and future developments for the TYPO3 Association. Interested to learn more about our plans? You can do so: Our projects.

Report by Peter Kraume / Stefan Busemann
Proofreading by Amy Hunt