Last month, we sent out the budget agreements for 2016 and in this article we are going to explain how the budgets have been assigned for 2016 and the motivations for the decisions we made.
Introduction
A few months ago we announced the process for receiving funds from the TYPO3 Association.
The application phase was followed by a discussion and a poll by the members. The results of this poll are meant to give the Expert Advisory Board (EAB) a guideline on how the members want to see the money spent.
Availability
For this year the TYPO3 Association has received budget applications for a total of 1.440.673,00 EUR (2014: 1.300.000 EUR) whilst we expect an income of 580.000 EUR (2014: 560.000 EUR) throughout 2015. We have decided to add 200.000 EUR from the stock for two reasons:
- We wanted to support the efforts of the community to build TYPO3 Inc. and supporting it with great marketing, new certifications and many more things.
- Second, we didn't want to slow down TYPO3 Development because we think that Mathias, Benni and their team are doing a tremendous job, so we wanted to provide them with enough budget to keep up the speed.
We expect that not all of the budgets will be 100% utilised.
Based on the members' poll the EAB discussed all budget applications in detail in late 2015. The output of these negotiations is the complete budget for 2016 which is attached to this article.
In the following weeks we informed the budget applicants about the status of their application. It took some time but last week we finally sent the budget agreements to all budget owners.
The Business Control Committee (BCC) has also received a copy of the granted budgets. The EAB will continue to work with the BCC and the TYPO3 Association's cashier to ensure the correct usage of the granted funds.
Application overview
To organize the projects we have assigned them into one of six budget categories:
- Research & Development
- Events
- Education, Certification & Documentation
- Management
- Investments
- Marketing & Communication
Research & Development
We have accepted the following applications as is:
- TYPO3 Security Team
The following budgets were granted partly:
- TYPO3 CMS
We reduced the Budget of the CMS by 25%, after we checked back with Benni and Mathias what they think would be the minimum amount they would need to be able to operate equally to 2015.
In the meantime we would like to ask you to raise your support of the TYPO3 project by reviewing and upgrading your membership or by giving one-time-sponsorships to the TYPO3 Association.
In both cases you are welcome to contact us.
The following applications from the research & development section will not receive funds from the TYPO3 Association in 2016:
- TYPO3 Accessibility Working Group
- TYPO3 WCAG
- Hello TYPO3
- PHPUnit TYPO3 extension
- TYPO3 Accessibility Package
- Fluid Designer
- Fluid TYPO3
- Flux
- TYPO3 User Experience Week 2016 – T3UXW16
- Gridelements
- TYPO3Themes
The reason why we did not grant these budgets is that we think all of these are directly related to TYPO3 CMS and thus should be handled by the product owner. Therefore, we transferred those applications into the responsibility of Mathias and the core team.
Nevertheless, we hope that some of these projects will be funded by sponsors. If you are interested in sponsoring any of these projects, please get in touch with us.
Events
The following applications were granted as is:
- T3CON 2016 & TYPO3 Award
- Event Committee
- Event Manager
- TYPO3 Developer Days 2016
Although T3CON 2016 and the TYPO3 Award were handed in as separate budgets, we agreed with Volker Graubaum and Marco Klawonn that it is better to have them tied together. Therefore, Volker and Marco updated their budget before it was approved. We think the TYPO3 Award is crucial to TYPO3 marketing.
Education, Certification & Documentation
The following applications were granted with reduction:
- Education Committee / TYPO3 Campus / Certifications (59%)
The reduction included removing openbadgets.org from the application, 7 instead of 14 task force sprints as well as acknowledgements for all of max. 5000 EUR.
- Documentation Maintainance and Improvement (80%)
Documentation Maintainance and Improvement budget was reduced by the first sprint, the getting started tutorial.
Management
The following applications were granted as is:
- President TYPO3 Association
- Membership in other organisations
- GA travel and hotel
- Expenses Accounting
- Expenses Lawyer
- Backoffice (Formerly Board Assistance)
- BCC Meeting and travel costs
- Licensing Team
- Expert Advisory Board (EAB)
The following applications were granted with reduction:
- T3CON 2016 travel and hotel (80%)
- General Assembly 2016 (80%)
- QSA 2016 (66%)
The following application has been denied:
- Operations Officer TYPO3 Association
The EAB decided not to grant the budget for the operations officer. In light of the TYPO3 Inc project, the board decided not to fill the vacancy which exists since September 2015.
Investments
The „Start Up TYPO3 Inc“ project has been granted up to 21%. The calculation of the EAB behind that is that we assume that the members of the TYPO3 Association will most likely vote for the TYPO3 Inc. in April. So instead of granting the whole budget, we only wanted to fund the Startup up to that point, in regard that financials will be handled by the new Inc afterwards.
Marketing & Communication
The following applications were granted as is:
- typo3.com relaunch
- typo3.org maintenance
- Professional Services Listing (PSL)
The following applications were granted with reduction:
- TYPO3 Marketing (35%)
The TYPO3 Marketing Budget was reduced by the cost of the T3O relaunch and the dedicated code sprints, the budget for the micro events due to the lack of explaination and least granted without any reserve.
- TYPO3 Design Team (88%)
The granted budget was reduced to only two sprints and no reserve.
Regarding the T3O styling part of the budget, we did not grant these budgets due to several different applications which were all related to T3O. We think that this should be handled in one combined application for better transparency.
- Editorial Team - typo3.org (75%)
- Media Team (50%)
- TYPO3 Server Team (80%)
- General Communications Budget (80%)
Final Remarks
All decisions were taken in full consent and with the best expectations.
The applications for this budget period have been higher in number and in amounts than last year. As a result they overshot the raise in our income considerably. Whilst this is a good sign of high activity within the projects it is also the reason we could not fund all applications we would have liked.
We would like to ask you to consider upgrading your membership or sponsor one of these listed projects directly. If you need further information on how to proceed, feel free to contact us.
On behalf of the Expert Advisory Board,
Chris Zepernick
Chris Zepernick
