Marketing Sprint 2013: Communication Workshop

Attendees: Helmut Hummel, Berit Hlubek, Boris Hinzer, Alain Veuve, Christian Händel, Ben van 't Ende, Ernesto Baschny, Oliver Hader, Steffen Ritter, Christian Müller, Christopher Hlubek, Jochen Stange, Jo Hasenau, Mathias Schreiber, Jens Hoffmann, Michael Stucki In the marketing team meetings we discussed diverse topics including marketing material, marketing strategy and team communication. Marketing for internal and external purposes has a large scope and the marketing team is always seeing possibilities to improve communication. As a team we communicate in bi-weekly online meetings and quarterly live meetings. Even having this many meetings we realised that this is not enough to accomplish certain tasks. It is quite common to have code sprints, usually for product development, to speed up development or to tackle specific problems. This is also a good format to tackle things currently difficult in the existing framework. To achieve direct progress the marketing team invited a wide range of different teams and people active in the TYPO3 community to a communication workshop, as part of a full-week marketing sprint, in order to improve the communication inside and outside the TYPO3 community and evolve ideas surrounding topics like leadership, communication and governance. The idea for the communication workshop was born at the beginning of 2013 during the marketing team meeting where we identified the need to foster more effective communication. We realised at the meeting that we needed to attract outside help to tackle this, which we found in the form of OSS Watch, master jedi on free and open source software.
Mark Johnson from OSS Watch explains about the Cathedral and the Bazaar The workshop was presented and moderated by Mark Johnson and Scott Wilson from <link http: oss-watch.ac.uk>OSS Watch. The workshop covered Open Source community topics concerning leadership, governance, negotiation, values, conflict, conflict resolution and everything surrounding communication. The marketing team feels very lucky to have found the people from OSS Watch that have such experience in the field of Open Source leadership. Working in an Open source project most participants were acquainted with the guiding principles of Open Source leadership, but getting the relationship presented between several properties raised awareness, especially concerning diversity on transparency and openness. The meeting can be considered a reminder of these principles and that coming together to discuss communication was a unique event in the TYPO3 community. It has motivated the participants to think about re-connecting and reaching out, and to be inviting to new community contributors and users on all levels. With respect to governance and policies surrounding communication the TYPO3 Community Code of Conduct was mentioned more than once as a guideline. The workshop was filled with activities for the participants like a survey to determine leadership style, governance analysis or the purpose and usage of different communication channels. Several Open Source projects like Ubuntu and Apache served as examples for governance and communication and showed potential issues and opportunities and how to deal with the topics.  
Mark Johnson and Scott Wilson form OSS Watch - TYPO3 Content Management is Magic

Major topics discussed during the workshop:

Reach out for new and re-connect to existing users and end users of TYPO3 products Commit to values and share them with the community

• Talk about a “shared goals” vision (Not “mission”)
• "What problems do we solve?"
• Why we are a community

Identify and lower barriers (So called: Commitment Gradient) Open up a Meta-channel for communication about communication and governance topics

• In English - "TYPO3-About"

Governance & Policy

• Communication guidelines
• Public vs Private policy on communications
• Principle of transparency in decisions & meetings
• Analysis & policies for communication channels
• Finding our positions for TYPO3 teams between the <link http: en.wikipedia.org wiki the_cathedral_and_the_bazaar>Cathedral and the Bazaar of governance (Where we are now - and where we want to be in future)

Improve acceptance of diversity of contributors

• Consider surface-level (age, gender, ethnic origin, religion & education) & deep-level (non-visible features, such as cultural values ??and experiences) diversity

Motivate community members to take more leadership

• Leaders should follow own rules - "Be the change you want to see"
• Leadership - clarity on what it is in TYPO3 (not just official rules)

Create a better connection between all teams (with different disciplines)
Communication Workshop participants The workshop brought a lot of motivation, understanding and enthusiasm to community work in general and the underlying motivation concerning contributing to an Open Source community. We will definitely continue these kind of workshops and will announce more at a later stage once we have evaluated the last workshop. We will share more about the process to improve communication in the "TYPO3 About" Mailinglist or forum. You’re of course invited to join in! If you are wondering about where to find the "typo3-about" mailing list, you can also access it as a web based forum:  <link http: forum.typo3.org index.php f>forum.typo3.org/index.php/f/118/ Simply login with your typo3.org username and start discussing...