December’s diary of the TYPO3 Association

This month’s diary wants to give you an overview on the work that the TYPO3 Association has done last year. 

First of all, we would like to thank all the supporting members who contributed to the projects and to our work. 2014 included for us a review of our bookkeeping as well as of the registered memberships. With new members joining and unfortunately, some other members leaving, and with some upgrades to platinum status, the year ends with a total of 729 TYPO3 Association members. In detail we count with the support of 391 bronze affiliations, 239 silver ones, 88 gold memberships and 11 platinum ones. 

Throughout 2014 we have worked hard to improve the Association’s workflow and processes. A strong focus has been on the <link>trademarks regulations, which have been published last October.

For the design and implementation of all these processes, we installed our “Executive Secretary” Naike Schulthess (formerly known as Naike Beggiato). She is a great help for the Association on its way to a more professional and effective organisation. Her tasks and responsibilities can be found at<link https: typo3.org http: association.typo3.org executive-secretary ref assoc _blank> association.typo3.org/executive-secretary/ref/assoc/. 

Great attention has been given also to the improvement of communication, within the Community and with external parties. The collaboration with the PR agency Finks & Fuchs has allowed us to be mentioned in numerous articles, as well as to release excellent interviews. 

The marketing team has had its share of work as during the whole year it has been visiting TYPO3 agencies around Europe to collect ideas on product improvements and feedback and inputs on the work of the TYPO3 Association. Besides that, we also collected feedback from our members, with a member survey at the beginning of the year. The results gave a valuable input as preparation for the agency meetups. At the beginning of 2015 we will finalize the processing of all feedback.

We are proud, that the TYPO3 Association has now memberships in other organisations: OASIS, OSI, ECO and CMS garden. Our aim is to interact with other projects, to learn from each other, and to make our project more visible.

2014 was a great year for the TYPO3 Education Committee. All started with the TYPO3 certification preparation workshops, which became very popular. Besides that, a team of now more than 10 members has been formed and it is still growing. Peter Pröll is team leader and Patrick Lobacher took over the co-lead. One big strategy sprint in July led to the „TYPO3 Campus idea“, a roadmap for the coming years and about 7 task forces. One of the task forces - the „Learning Units“ - had a productive sprint in December which will show its first results in the beginning of 2015.

The certification team reached its goals by delivering Forceps of Certified CMS Integrator example updated (LTS update 6.2) and by setting up a new question pool extension, to be able to handle multiple certifications. All in all, there have been 142 exam registrations in 2014, of which 53 succeeded, 76 failed, and 13 cancelled their participation. The certification team has set its aims also for the following year. In 2015, there will be a kick off of the new Dev Cert (between February and April) in order to introduce the team, define an outline, and begin generating questions. This will be followed by a second sprint, aimed at discussing the existing questions and at generating even more questions. For 2015, the plan includes a restructure of the certification team and closer collaboration with the education committee, with the common goal of pushing the TYPO3 certification and education further.