The marketing team has requested a large budget for the coming year, 2013. On Forge this budget request has been discussed and the marketing team would like to expand on the budget request itself as the original budget request was not to detailed.
You can find the discussion on the budget on the <link http: forge.typo3.org boards topics>Budget 2013 - Marketing/Infrastructure Forge page and at the bottom you will find the full PDF "TYPO3 Appendix to Budget Proposal Website Infrastructure Optimization" Here is a summary of what is in the full budget proposal.
There are several reasons TYPO3, as a brand, suffers a decline in market recognition, while our community keeps growing. The marketing team deals with those one by one. We feel that with Neos we will have a very competitive product and this is an opportunity for the whole TYPO3 eco-system. The marketing team needs some tools to be able to make optimal use of this opportunity.
As a most important basis we have our websites infrastructure which is currently far from optimal. TYPO3's main websites typo3.org and typo3.com have been consolidated and were relaunched in spring 2012. Other parts of that infrastructure, like association.typo3.org, shop.typo3.org and buzz.typo3.org run independently in different layouts and older TYPO3 versions. There is currently very little technical support and we would like to see the shop experience improved as to make it as easy as possible to shop at TYPO3.
We plan around 4 code sprints a year and our goal is to consolidate as many of the websites as possible into the typo3.org installation. The shop website's backend has grown to be very complicated. Maintenance of the Professional Services Listing is also done through the shop. In general all maintenance should be made much simpler then it currently is. There needs to be a possibility to quickly set up websites. Event websites are often too late, which upsets people. On top of these changes we need a technical team to be available for the TYPO3 infrastructure.
We need to assure that we attract TYPO3 companies that are not yet member of the TYPO3 Association and keep them as members. Along with these services we need to support members that want to organise their own events and have a central campaign management that can manage the delivery of promotion deliverables from one point to several websites.
Other functionalities that need to be improved include business administration, billing, voting and budget reporting. The Professional Services Listing could become a major revenue driver for the Association, but needs to be much more usable.
As you can see the marketing team has, along with the board, recognized that profound changes need to be made to the infrastructure. Changes that strongly support our goal to improve marketing a lot. The need of having this budget applications serves the goal to make TYPO3 strong in the market again.
Look at this drill-down:
- A strong brand make decisions makers go for our products.
- A strong brand results from great products and good marketing. With NEOS we simply have the next generation of Web CMS. What is lacking are increased marketing efforts
- In order to make good marketing you need to have, along with other things, good tools.
- In order to have good tools you need some money to get them in place and running.
This is a summary of what is in the detailed budget proposal. Please refer to the detailed budget proposal for the full picture.
