Marketing Team Meeting July 2013

Participants: Volker Graubaum, Christian Händel, Boris Hinzer, Ben van ‘t Ende, Berit Hlubek (leader), Alain Veuve. Volker Graubaum who organises the Developer Days and the TYPO3 conference in Stuttgart joins this meeting as a guest to talk about communication internally and externally. Volker is a great motivator, as some of you might know. We decide to start next marketing team meetings with some invitations for people to join depending on the topics we discuss and have a general communication slot. Volker suggests regular meetings between PR (Søren Schaffstein), Events, Community Management, Marketing, Editorial. That makes sense as these are all centered around communication. Volker mentions it is not always too visible that the marketing team is an operational team. Fortunately he also let the outside world know through his tweeting that the marketing team is working on several things as he experiences first hand. Volker explains his plans for the coming TYPO3 conference in Stuttgart and it’s three days with focus on community, future and business. We come to the conclusion that the conference website is hard to find. Volker takes immediate action to do some serious Search Engine Optimisation. We also discuss some things for the conference in 2014. We discuss the naming of the websites and get a better fitted proposal for naming the official event websites, which we will also discuss with the server team before we go to implementation. Currently the handling of sub-domains is a bit in-transparent. After a discussion about the relationship of the marketing team towards the official event,  we appoint Berit as a contact person from the marketing team to the conference organisation. The Inspiring Flow video is a well-done video and is quite successful in accompanying the release of Flow 2.0. Netresearch already volunteered to sponsor another video about the conference in Stuttgart. The idea would be to do a video of each day by the Lumalenscape guys and a separate video well in advance of the conference for promotional purposes. We also discuss that we need to keep in mind that we do not do wasteful stuff for the conference and respect the environment in the material we use. Regarding food we also recommend to have a balanced menu with more healthy and vegetarian stuff. Certification is a hot topic. We need to give the new certification process some more attention. The certification website needs to be integrated into typo3.org. Most work surrounding that is done and we are waiting for some technical details to be solved. We will create some exposure accompanying the newly integrated certification website. The current leadership for typo3.org maintenance announced to have a very limited amount of time to guide the maintenance surrounding this effort. We will try to find a solution where we have partly paid support on a support contract basis. We have to see if budget can be freed up this year and be sure to request budget for this the coming year.  One important topic this meeting, that has been on the agenda for quite some time now is a sprint dedicated to marketing. We have managed to secure a good location for this sprint near Mannheim in the period from November 19 – November 23. This particular sprint will have three parts. It will start of with one day that will be dedicated to strategy, after that we will have three days dedicated to the marketing of our different products, creating marketing material and such. The sprint will end with a two-day workshop about Open Source Communication and Community Leadership, where we will invite team leaders from the TYPO3 community and people in a leadership position. The goal of the workshop is to promote a better communication culture in our community. The workshop will be done by two people from OSSwatch that are also closely related to the Apache Software Foundation. We decided to more regular meetings and shorter. We will invite people to the meetings when the topic fits. We welcome Boris Hinzer and Christian Händel as members of the marketing team after having been contributors for some time. Some team members have left the marketing team and we thank them for their time and support. Like with all team participation it can be a very demanding job especially when most of the work is done on a voluntary basis and in spare time. The marketing team is open for new contributors and helping hands. We will communicate these facts on our <link>team pages and through social media. We leave this meeting enthusiastically and with a sense of achievement looking forward to things to come in the future.