Meet Luisa Faßbender, TYPO3 Community Marketing, Germany (Application Podcast S1E3)

Categories: Community, Podcasts Created by Jeffrey A. McGuire
Join me chatting with Luisa Faßbender on episode three of Application, the TYPO3 Community Podcast. We find out about her path from student to intern to an agency position, to her current role of TYPO3 Community Marketing Lead, and how the pandemic of 2020 helped kick off her master's degree. We discuss helping clients, making good decisions and building trust, the cycle of inspiration, and Luisa's favorite thing about TYPO3. Hint, it's all about the structure for her. I hope you enjoy this episode at least as much as I enjoyed speaking with Luisa to put it together.

Listen to the full interview in the audio player here or watch the interview video below, where you’ll also find a full transcript of our conversation. 

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What Does a Community Marketing Lead Do? 

If you’re wondering what happens within the community marketing project at TYPO3.org, this episode is for you! Luisa chats about her role as Communty Marketing Lead and gives us an overview of the TYPO3 community Marketing Group:

“We’re working on creating more international or national landing pages to enable more people from outside the Germany, Austria, and Switzerland region to reach TYPO3 ... We’re trying to reach out to people outside of Europe, so we have Paul Hansen on the team now, who's from North America.” 

TYPO3 is an open-source community project. Spreading the joy of TYPO3 around the world is something that Luisa and many in the community love to do. One of the ways that the marketing team and the community come together is within the TYPO3 mentoring program: 

“And that also goes hand in hand with the mentorship program, because we are not [just] trying to reach potential customers overseas, but we are also trying to get people to use TYPO3, and to also be able to build their own careers on TYPO3. … And there's people from 12 different countries who are now being mentored by people from the TYPO3 community.”

On Balancing Work and Community Projects

One of the areas I’m always amazed by is how people find the time to have full time jobs and still be active contributors. Luisa touches on some wonderful points about how your job and your interests with TYPO3 can have a symbiotic relationship, ultimately helping you to shape the career you want. Luisa works at Marketing Factory GmbH where staff is encouraged to participate in open source projects: 

“Pretty much everyone's encouraged to do it. Because a lot of folks ... in our company actually do contribute in some way or another. I maybe do it a little bit more openly and more publicly than others, but we have a lot of extensions which we maintain ... if you would like to contribute to TYPO3 in any kind of way, you're free to do it.”

Where It All Began

One of the poignant parts of this podcast is how working with TYPO3 has helped to shape Luisa’s career. Luisa discusses how she was initially daunted at the idea of joining TYPO3 sprints or dealing with the community, but after a year learning about open-source software and how it works she took part in the RheinRhur camp:

If you don't know anything about CMS or open source in general, the concept of having free software that's supported by a lot of people who do it in their free time, or who just enjoy making the product better, is really weird.

“And I remember I'd started here [at Marketing Factory] in September. And there's the TYPO3 camp in RheinRhur in Essen, in November each year, and they invited me to come, but I didn't because I was kind of scared. I was 19. 

“They were just talking about, ‘Oh, there are so many enthusiasts and they, this guy just did a new extension. And he presented about that.’ And the concept of that was so far out of my scope that I didn't really know what to think of it. And I actually just started learning about what open source actually means and what the community part means. When I went to my first TYPO3 camp, which was a year later.”

From here Luisa has been working on her Master’s degree in marketing and communications along with her TYPO3 certifications so that she serve her clients to the best of her ability. 

In this podcast you’ll also hear gems on how to build better client relationships, the cycle of inspiration, and motivation to work with TYPO3 along with our segments on ‘Favorite TYPO3 Features’ and ‘Suggest-a-Guest’. What are you waiting for? Inspiration awaits. It’s time to press play and meet Luisa Faßbender!

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Gratitude

Application, the TYPO3 Community Podcast could not have happened without our special guest Luisa Faßbender, b13 and Stefanie Kreuzer for our logo, and Maestro Patrick Gaumond for our wonderful, quirky theme music. 

And a huge thank you to the TYPO3 Association for sponsoring this podcast!

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Meet your host

Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire, Partner at Open Strategy Partners, helps organizations communicate and grow at the intersection of open source software, business, and culture. He connects the value and people behind the technologies to the people who need to know about them through inspiring conversations, keynotes, podcasts, and more. 

His approach to technology marketing—sharing the human context of complex technology solutions, and celebrating the expertise and success of their creators—has left its mark in business and open source communities over the last 15+ years.

Interview Transcript

Artificial-Intelligence-driven transcription, mostly artificial, less intelligence. May contain errors.

Jeffrey McGuire  0:03
Welcome to application the TYPO3 community podcast. One, two. Welcome to application, the TYPO3 community podcast. I'm Jeffrey A. McGuire. You can call me Jam. And this is where we celebrate the TYPO3 community sharing your stories, talking about your projects and the difference you make in around and withTYPO3 CMS. Today on application, the TYPO3 community podcast I talked with Luisa Faßbender about her path from student to intern to agency job to TYPO3 community marketing lead, and how the pandemic of 2020 helped kick off her master's degree. We discuss helping clients making good decisions and building trust, the cycle of inspiration and Luisa's favorite thing about TYPO3. Hint, it's all about the structure for her. I hope you enjoy this episode at least as much as I enjoyed speaking with Luisa to put it together.

Hello. How are you?

Luisa  1:09
I'm good. How about you?

Jeffrey McGuire  1:11
Are you in the office in Dusseldorf?

Luisa  1:14
Yup. Monday, Thursdays are my office days since Okay, June or something. And where are you? Are you at the WeWork's space?

Jeffrey McGuire  1:24
I am actually Yep. I think I think I filled you in on what we're doing here. But the association was kind enough to be interested in having a TYPO3 podcast and I think for myself that it goes pretty well with the sort of activities you're doing and the sort of things that that we care about in this open source community. And my interest is sharing the stories behind this technology in this community in this project. And I'm really interested in what it does and what the value is that it delivers to people of course, but I'm also really keen to introduce some people to the community and have this as another way that people can learn about what's going on in the in the whole, in the whole ecosystem. And you were very high up on my list. Thank you for accepting.

Luisa  2:29
Thanks for inviting me.

Jeffrey McGuire  2:31
I have not got an official tagline or intro spiel or anything yet, but this is the probably official TYPO3 podcast and today I am speaking with Luisa Faßbender. Luisa Faßbender comes from the border between Holland and Germany and works at a little TYPO3 company in Dusseldorf called

Luisa  2:57
Marketing Factory Consulting GBH,

Jeffrey McGuire  3:00
Marketing Factory Consulting GBH. So why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? What do you do? privately, personally? And what do you do professionally?

Luisa  3:13
Well, yeah, let's start with the professional part. And I've been working at Marketing Factory as a project assistant for three years during my dual studies for my bachelor's degree, then I convert it to a full time job, and I've been here ever since for two years now. And now I've just started my master's degree in marketing and communications on the side. So I do a full time job during the week, and then an evening and Saturday study, master thesis type. Additionally.

Jeffrey McGuire  3:45
Wow.Congratulations. You. Um, did you need? Did you need a hobby? Is that you had you have too much time on your hands?

Luisa  3:54
Yeah, due to Corona. I wanted to start my master's degree last year. But then, like, things came up, and I just didn't really feel like doing it. And I felt overwhelmed concerning like, there was so many parties going on, and you were always trying to meet your friends. And that's all gone. So yeah, I basically needed a hobby. And I felt like why not start now?

Jeffrey McGuire  4:15
Oh, how interesting. Wait a minute. So I'm gonna pull that apart for a second. You. You wanted to continue your education in this way. But you're so popular, your social life felt like too much to like it was getting in the way. And so the 2020 pandemic is, has actually got a silver lining for you.

Luisa  4:37
Yeah, because I was thinking about what I could do in my free time if I'm stuck at home. So right, yeah, I thought about maybe learning a new language. But then I thought like, if you don't start your master's degree now, I'm not going to start when I'm 30. So yeah, that's what I'm doing now. And I mean, new languages are fine, and we have lots of global communication channels now but a lot of people like to learn new languages because they want to travel right. And travel is not something I want to think about right now. Still,

Yeah, we know for a couple of months.

Jeffrey McGuire  5:08
So right, whenever you're listening to this podcast, dear listeners, watchers readers, we're speaking in October 2020, in real time, and we're both based in Germany and things are okay here, although I happen to know that Luisa lives in one of the hardest hit parts of the country. But things are things are tricky. And there's not a lot of places that we can go easily. So it's Yes, it's a very strange time. Right. But I believe I interrupted you. So you spent three years on your internship, working sort of combination. In Germany, this dual study is really interesting. People can can be paid professionals and study at the same time. And now you've been working full time, two years. And now, are you still working? You said you're working full time while you're doing your masters?

Luisa  6:01
Yeah, it's five days a week of working at the office or at home, whatever is like it depends on the day, like, as I said, Mondays and Thursdays, I'm usually in Dusseldorf, and the other three days I'm at home. And then I have classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. So

Jeffrey McGuire  6:18
online,

Luisa  6:19
online, most of the time, if we're less than 50 people, it's on site, but it's also Düsseldorf But that happened like two times so far. So

Jeffrey McGuire  6:29
what are you going into in your masters?

Luisa  6:31
It's Marketing and Communications?

Jeffrey McGuire  6:33
Nice. Okay.

Luisa  6:35
Pretty fitting with my role at the TYPO3 association as well. Right?

Jeffrey McGuire  6:39
Right? I want to touch on that for sure. What is it that you do at your company nowadays? And how do you What does that have to do with TYPO3?

Luisa  6:47
I'm still working as a project manager. So I am taking care of client's needs and requests. And I'm forwarding them either to our developers, I'm writing offers, I'm writing invoices, I'm creating concepts. And we are mostly working with TYPO3 as our CMS of choice. So that's how I got into TYPO3 in the first place. We do work with WordPress and Symfony . Besides that in other projects, that depends on what the different requirements are, but mostly we do TYPO3.

Jeffrey McGuire  7:21
Sure, I mean, every project has a has a more appropriate set of tools and a less appropriate set of tools. And there are plenty of choices out there. And how you help your clients I think and how you do best for your company, you must know quite a lot about TYPO3 itself and getting it implemented to be able to make an effective offer and promise timelines and such and I, I believe you're also a certified TYPO3 integrator, is that right?

Luisa  7:46
Not yet. I'm working on it. so far. I'm just an editor and a consultant. But I want to get more into the technical stuff. So I'm working on that as well.

Jeffrey McGuire  7:54
Okay, so I'm TYPO3 certification in in this community, something that I really want to explore in the with other guests on the podcast, but you've got two have the you've got to have the possible four certifications, editor, integrator, developer, and you certainly know your way around a TYPO3 installation and and have an idea about the scope of when I asked for something you tell me. I'm crazy. And that'll take way too much time and cost way too much money.

Luisa  8:22
Yeah. And again, it should always be your goal as a project manager in TYPO3 to know more about the project, the customers project than the customer itself. Because it's not really professional, someone calls and it's like, oh, it doesn't work. And you're just like, yeah, I can see that it doesn't work.

Jeffrey McGuire  8:41
Was your discovery of TYPO3, also your first introduction to open source?

Luisa  8:45
Yeah, it was, I didn't plan on going into the tech or IT sector at all before. So that might be interesting.

Jeffrey McGuire  8:54
And what happened?

Luisa  8:55
I actually wanted to go into the, like fashion sector because my mom is a fashion designer. And I worked at a wedding dress store for three years beside my high school. But then I learned about how hard the fashion sector is I met it's pretty bitchy, and you probably don't have a lot of chances if you don't have a lot of money there. So yeah, I kind of stumbled upon Marketing Factory without any deeper thoughts. And that's how I got and that's how I first learned about open source to be honest. I never knew about that before.

Jeffrey McGuire  9:34
So as they say, in Germany, learning by doing?

Luisa  9:36
Yeah, definitely.

Jeffrey McGuire  9:39
And do you have a first memory of learning about open source in these concepts? That was that was there a moment where you're like, Whoa, you know, it's free or how do you make money or it was there? Was there a culture shock there at any point?

Luisa  9:55
Definitely. Cuz like if you don't know anything about CMS or like open source in general, the concept of having a free software that's supported by a lot of people who do it in their free time or who just enjoy making the product better, is really weird.

And I remember I'd started here in September. And there's the TYPO3 camp in RheinRhur in Essen, in November each year, and they invited me to come, but I didn't because I was kind of scared. I was 19. Like, you know, that? I don't know. And they were just talking about, oh, there are so many enthusiasts and they, this guy just did a new extension. And he presented about that. And the concept of that was so far out of my scope that I didn't really know what to think of it. And I actually just started learning about what open source actually means and what the community part means. When I went to my first TYPO3 camp, which was a year later.

Jeffrey McGuire  10:51
Uh, huh. No, haha, so, okay, so you found your feet and got used to the geeks in the office before you, you before you went out into the community. But nowadays, nowadays, you're right in the middle of contributing and giving presentations yourself, right?

Luisa  11:08
Yeah, correct. I actually did my first three presentations this year, also, thanks to Corona, probably. Cuz they were all online. Yeah. And I just really like giving presentations, which is weird, because I used to hate giving presentations in high school or even during my bachelor degree. Yeah, but somehow I really enjoy it. So I would like to continue doing that.

Jeffrey McGuire  11:33
And what's the what's the motivation? What is it that you enjoy about it?

Luisa  11:36
I love when I meet new people. And I love talking about things that really interest me and that motivate me. And it's even more. What How do I say that? I love seeing that people are motivated by what I am doing and what the marketing team, for example, is doing. Because I get lots of good feedback. And that motivates me to do better. And then that's like a cycle that repeats

Jeffrey McGuire  12:03
nice.

Luisa  12:04
Best part.

Jeffrey McGuire  12:05
So a cycle of inspiration, maybe?

Luisa  12:08
Yep, because now I really understand the slogan inspiring people to share. Because in the beginning, I didn't think I could contribute anything that would inspire anyone for anything.

Jeffrey McGuire  12:17
TYPO3 is not the only open source project I'm involved in, I've always felt that this open source community experience, I really enjoyed your explanation now because I think that going to the events, or writing blog posts, there's this idea that I'm like, Oh, I had this terrible problem. And I fixed it now. And let me show you what I did. So that you don't have to go through that this this, that generosity of ideas beyond any, anything about clients or money or being a professional or a developer or not. It's this idea of, of let me show you this cool thing that I found, you know, I really, I really love that feeling. I really, really do.

Luisa  13:00
Me too. Because immediately feel included, like there was no point where I came into a room and felt left out, which was also something I didn't expect.

Jeffrey McGuire  13:07
Terrific. Yeah, yeah, I had, I had very early open source experiences in communities that were, quote unquote, developers only. And that was, I think that was uncomfortable at the time. But I think the whole thing has come a long way since then, I think especially a CMS community that has reached a certain size, because the CMS itself is very much on the on the public end of software, right? It's the stuff that everybody interacts with, because it makes websites because there's so much there that's to be sort of seen and touched and understood that there's a it's quite easy to understand that in the end, you need a lawyer and a business person and a designer and a developer and all these other skill sets. And I think that that that came a long way. And not every community gets that it's still which is which is also kind of weird.

Luisa  13:58
When was your first contact with any kind of open source community?

Jeffrey McGuire  14:04
2005

Luisa  14:05
Oh, wow.

Jeffrey McGuire  14:06
Yeah. Yep. 2005, I started building websites in 2006, and

Luisa  14:15
with?

Jeffrey McGuire  14:16
Drupal.

To be fair, I started building websites with pure HTML and CSS, and then with PHP placeholders. And then with content management systems, and because of my circle of friends, and so on, I use Drupal and Drupal is another community that I that I'm still involved in, in another system that has a strength of its own, although it's sort of in competition with TYPO3. There is so much more web out there and so much more digital stuff out there that I don't think that I don't think that anybody has to you know, steal things from each other when we can go and help help so many people By sometime in 2007 I think I was working full time. With open source software to make my living and by 2008, I'd actually gotten a job at a startup. So, and the rest has been a lot of, yeah, a lot. So what's the coolest thing you've ever done with TYPO3 so far?

Luisa  15:16
The coolest thing is probably, we did a completely new site for an existing customer, which they had a TYPO3 installation before, which was based on I think, 7.6. And it was like, at least 12 years old, and I got the project from my boss to take care of it. And they wanted to do a complete reload. So TYPO3 version nine, because it was done last year. And we were thinking about if we would like to do an upgrade, so an upgrade path and migrating content and whatever.

But I was actually able to convince them to just start on a new basis, because they had like this huge, it's, it's an American company. And they had this huge customer structure, which was so outdated, like, I think 80% of the customers in the database were outdated. And yeah, we were actually able to convince them to start fresh. And we did a completely new concept and completely build the whole customer management structure new. So that was really cool.

Jeffrey McGuire  16:21
Nice

Luisa  16:22
now it's now a document database and customer administration database, which can be used completely on the front end. So no administrators need to go into the back end anymore, which was the part that confused them the most in the old one.

Jeffrey McGuire  16:36
I guess it gives you some more security and stability on the whole thing as well.

Luisa  16:39
Yeah, cuz it was always like I had the back end was really slow, because there were like, I don't know, 20,000 customers in the back end, and they all needed to be in a certain folder, and then you'd have like three elements created, it was, it was really something for a while, we've just cut that all out. So now it's actually pretty quick. And yeah, we don't need backend accesses anymore, which is also really important, because there are lots of like, important documents, which shouldn't be seen by everyone. So now everyone just sees with the contents he is allowed to see.

Jeffrey McGuire  17:12
Nice logo. And it's a for an American company.

Luisa  17:15
Yeah, it's actually a multinational company, but they have their headquarters in Minnesota.

Jeffrey McGuire  17:21
Nice. If you don't have a case study out there about that it would be really great to do a case study, because I think that more people in more parts of the world should know about TYPO3 as an option for enterprise applications and websites. And one of the things that TYPO3 is great for is information, dense information rich websites. And I might my personal view of TYPO3 sort of design ethos, and history and design concept is that it's come from agencies and built by agencies for agencies. So agencies with TYPO3 have this toolset for building large client websites well, and then customizing them where they need. So large catalogs of information, large hierarchical data structures, all those sorts of things end up working really, really well in the system. And it sounds like you got to do a project that proves me right.

Luisa  18:20
It was actually a really cool project, like the first briefing was like, Oh, we just need to redesign it a little bit. And then we need to do from CSC to FSC. And whatever. Yeah, and that would have been such such a big amount of work, but actually starting fresh, and just cutting everything out. And just putting in the information, the documents that the customers they actually need was even cheaper than if we would have tried to upgrade it, like through all two different versions.

Jeffrey McGuire  18:50
Interestingly,

Luisa  18:50
there was like a win win for everyone. We didn't have to deal with the old data, and they didn't have to spend like 20,000 euros more.

Jeffrey McGuire  18:57
And and dealing with clients, when you tell them the thing that you asked for that you think you want, we can do that for, you know, 100 money? And they'd be like, Yes, fine, we'll sign that contract, say, Actually, I have this other option, and it'll get you better result for 75 money instead. It's a real trust builder, right?

Luisa  19:17
Yeah, definitely. We actually run into that quite a lot. Because our, like the people we speak to in the different companies we work for aren't always the most tech savvy people. And they are just like the speaking path to 'oh just tell the agency to do it'. So if they send us some kind of requirement, and we we don't know, we look over it, and we see that it doesn't make sense at all. They are actually really happy about our feedback. And then most times we get to speak to the people actually deciding what they want, instead of just being having this like big line of people telling people to tell people that I have to tell people something that's actually a trust builder because if we tell them we could do that, but it doesn't make sense or it's going to be unstable is going to break really easily, or it's going to be really expensive. And we could do it cheaper. That's definitely something that customers really value in our customer management or customer agency relationship.

That also comes back to I know, we're on the official TYPO3 podcast insert, like slogan in here. But still, if a customer comes to us, and he wants a blog or something, we actually, we definitely tell him, you should probably use WordPress for that. So we are not married to TYPO3, because for some projects, TYPO3 just isn't the right. CMS, but vice versa. Also WordPress does work for other things. So that's also important.

Jeffrey McGuire  20:43
What about when you have a client who already has an existing TYPO3 instance. And they want a small site, would you just launch a separate site within the multi site structure instead of giving the WordPress?

Luisa  20:55
Ah No, actually, we will probably use WordPress for that as well. And just give them two separate logins. Because we've done that in the past as well. We had a client who had like, it's like a more skilled, but for a for companies. So you could actually look for companies who were being sold, like, interesting. They had that. And that was based on TYPO3 And they had their corporate side, which was based on TYPO3, and those ones were in the same installation, but then they also wanted a blog. And it was, it was a really simple block with just I don't know, like 20 different functionalities. And that was actually created in WordPress, because it was easier than trying to set up a block and TYPO3.

Jeffrey McGuire  21:38
But it's great not to be dogmatic about those choices, right? Yeah. Um, and just because it's a, you know,

Luisa  21:46
just because we're a TYPO3 agency doesn't mean we only have to sell TYPO3.

Jeffrey McGuire  21:51
That's fair. And then, because you do Symfony, for example, you can also build custom libraries or specialist applications that integrate into other things to correct. But back to type of three, what's your favorite TYPO3 feature? What's your favorite thing that it does?

Luisa  22:07
I've talked about that quite a few times. And my favorite thing about TYPO3 is that it's so structured. And I love that, especially in the newer versions, the just simple drag and drop options. It's also self explanatory, you can structure everything, just how you want it. And you can replace certain things really easily and edit them really easily.

If I think about for the WordPress Gutenberg editor, for example, I'm not a fan of that, because I think it's really, it's such a pain in the butt, to use, I don't know, to edit content in there. And to actually see how it would display on the front end, even though what you see is what you get editor. But yeah, I really love the content elements and the content element opportunities and TYPO3. And I love the page three, because it's so easy to navigate through the whole set without having to click like 20 different tabs open,

Jeffrey McGuire  23:02
it's a very nice paradigm as well, for the people who have to live and work in the site every day, you know, thinking beyond building a site and creating a solution. And then handing it off. There are people of course, who work in the back end, and they work on content or, or their customer database, or whatever it is those people knowing that top to bottom left to right, or however it is, you know, you know exactly where you are in the site. And you can find where you're going and and what to. And that that can automatically be your menu structure that can automatically be your URL structure, that can automatically be your permission structure, it's really, really helpful. It's a really useful set of, of shortcuts, right for for hierarchical organization.

Luisa  23:47
Yeah, again, also, the permissions in the back end user rights are just so easy to configure. And you can actually configure them really easily and just create different groups with different permissions. And you don't have to worry about, I don't know, an intern doing something he's not supposed to do, because he just doesn't see it simply. That's something I really like.

Jeffrey McGuire  24:08
What's something that most people don't know about TYPO3 that you run into? It maybe they should know?

Luisa  24:18
That it's definitely not just for enterprises, because we market it like TYPO3 markets itself as an enterprise content management system. But as we said before, sometimes it makes sense to just build a smaller site with TYPO3 as well. If for example, he know that the site is going to scale. And I think a lot of people don't know about the variety of extensions and just extension mechanisms there are in TYPO3 because basically everything can be connected to TYPO3 by now, because of all the standards that have been implemented right in I think lots of people think that WordPress for example is better because there are like all these plugins which you can buy. But most of the functionalities, which WordPress offers in the I don't know, it's called plugin store or marketplace, whatever they they are available for TYPO3 as well as well in the extension repository. So

Jeffrey McGuire  25:14
I think the mirror image of that is one of the things that I like. It's been designed by agencies to deliver agency projects as a as a paradigm. It does so much out of the box without many extensions and gives you a really great user experience and a really great base to build on. And you can get quite a long way it does more than some systems out of the box, the clean API's and all of the extension mechanisms, then let you do that last customization however you want it.

Luisa  25:44
Yeah, because most of the time, if it's like a standard corporate site TYPO3 just has everything that the company needs, like you don't have to install a variety of extensions just to get a run inside. Yeah, if you use like the bootstrap package, for example, and a simple TYPO3, you can basically create a site within a day.

Jeffrey McGuire  26:03
What's your path to doing a marketing degree? And and how does that come together with your role as the community marketing lead for What's your path toTYPO3?

Luisa  26:12
Well, I was thinking about which kind of focus I should set my master's degree on for quite a while because I was struggling between IT management, which would have fit my job here better and marketing and communications, which would affect the TYPO3 marketing role better. But in the end, I listened to a couple of classes beforehand, and I'm just a lot more enthusiastic about marketing than I am about standard IT management and like archistructure, microstructural things.

So yeah, I think what I'm doing at uni now will really benefit me in the long run, because I would like to go more into the marketing sector of things. Anyways, and yeah, yeah, again, IT management would have fit my job at Marketing Factory better, because that's more like the technical side of things. But to be honest, I've always been more intrigued and interested in the marketing side. And that's also why I love being the marketing team lead for TYPO3 , because I just find that whole sector of marketing, a lot more interesting than just the technical stuff. I love to have like a mixture of that. So yeah, I can do my day to day job, still five days a week and have all of my technical knowledge here and build it here. But I can still learn about the thing that actually interests me, and unique. Anything there are,

Jeffrey McGuire  27:31
There are wonderful ways to combine those having really solid technical knowledge and having knowledge of this industry. And then learning how to communicate. There are there are tremendous opportunities there. Plus, you said that you like to meet new people and know what they're about. So that's more of a marketing style job than an IT management job, I imagine.

Luisa  27:52
Yeah, yeah, it's a nice mixture of things. Because here I own, I also do like some slight coding changes and stuff like that. I talked about that the online community event with my colleague, actually. But still, I'm more interested in like, social side of things. So I think marketing just fits me better than it management. So that's why I chose it

Jeffrey McGuire  28:14
At your company, is there is their official opportunity to contribute and be part of the community. How does that how's the approach to being in the community work there?

Luisa  28:22
Pretty much everyone's encouraged to do it. Because a lot of folks in our community in our company actually do contribute in some way or another. I maybe do it a little bit more openly and more publicly than others. But we have a lot of extensions, which we maintain and like all of them are in there. We have Simon Hughes in the dashboard, or who wasn't the dashboard initiative before it got merged into core. And then like Ingo is also in the BCC and yeah, if you would like to contribute to toggle through in any kind of way, you're free to do it.

Jeffrey McGuire  28:54
I have seen Ingo at a lot of community events and he's participated in some of the community marketing sprints that I've been at over the years to Yeah, contribution is kind of encouraged. You were at the company a year before you had the had the you found the strength to meet the community. And how did you end up being the community marketing lead?

Luisa  29:15
Well, that's actually thanks to you somehow, because you were the one who invited me to the first marketing sprint, which I attended.

Jeffrey McGuire  29:24
That was very nice of me.

Luisa  29:26
Yeah, that was really nice. Yeah, my first marketing sprint was in December of 2018. And Venlo, and I think you were the one who invited me to come there. And then I just really loved it. And I was really passionate about it. And now I kind of lead it or I try to lead it as best as I can.

Jeffrey McGuire  29:46
What does that look like the what is the marketing team? Get up to?

Luisa  29:50
Oh, that's, let's start with the basics we try to do or we try to do all the release communications for version 10. Which was not too successful because we didn't really have the who's responsible for what down yet in our community, and especially in combination with the TYPO3 GmbH. Because like the marketing team comes kinda is late to the GmbH as well.

So that was weird, knowing who's responsible for what and who's able to decide what. But besides that, we now did a lot of analysis. Because we wanted to be able to see where we're at just to be able to start out somehow, because before it was kind of like, let's do this, oh, no, then let's do that. And we were just hopping around. So we did a competitor analysis. And now we're trying to know we're trying, we're building battle cards. So actual comp, competitor comparisons, because they were really highly asked for in our surveys, which we did nice, just to enable decision makers to actually be able to factually base make factual based decisions, whether they want to choose Drupal, or TYPO3 , for example. We did a as an SEO analysis, and we're still trying to get all of those results. We were working on creating more international or national landing pages to enable more people from outside the Germany, Austria and Switzerland region to reach TYPO3 , regional TYPO3 community in any kind of way. We were trying to reach out to people outside of Europe, all in all, so we have Paul Hansen on the team now who's from North America. And we're trying to get more into the North American market there. As we all know, TYPO3 is basically not known in the USA, whatsoever.

Jeffrey McGuire  31:44
It's basically it was on it, quite a few years ago, now it was on its way and it was growing. And then, um, there was the, there was a difficult time in the community around not releasing, not releasing version five. And that turned into NEOs, and all of that split. And then things came back together since version six, seven, you know, the, the TYPO3 ecosystem is really professionalized and adopted all the standards that you were talking about earlier in them.

Yeah. And I really share the goal of getting the word out in more places. And I'm really excited that there's been a couple of sprints in India, for example, yeah, and that a couple of governments in Africa actually use TYPO3 , and there's been some community outreach to help them upgrade and maintain their infrastructure. And I think it's a exciting, an exciting time for that. And, um, I think that in my different places that I engage with TYPO3 as a project and as a community, I think that's, that's maybe the the unifying theme is to that I'd like the word to go out further.

Luisa  32:49
Yeah. And that also goes hand in hand with the mentorship program, because we are not trying to reach potential customers overseas. But we are also trying to just get people to use TYPO3 , and to also be able to build their own careers, about like on TYPO3 . So that's also something I'm really excited to see what comes out of that, because I think it started a month ago, maybe. And there's people from like, 12 different countries who are now being mentored by people from the TYPO3 community which helped them learn about the basics of TYPO3 , so that they can spread the word in their areas.

Jeffrey McGuire  33:23
Are you involved in that or just observing it?

Luisa  33:26
I'm just an observer, and I like to talk about it.

Jeffrey McGuire  33:30
Building advocacy, the best way that you can possibly do that is help someone make their life better, and then they'll automatically be excited about about how they got there.

Luisa  33:40
Yeah, and if they're excited about it, they're going to tell people in their area about it. And that's going to spread the word more like naturally, then I'll try to force some TYPO3 hat on someone, right, or someone takes it and goes with it.

Jeffrey McGuire  33:54
I would like to know what your favorite open source project is?

Luisa  33:59
My favorite open source project is TYPO3 . But I think that's also because I'm so deeply linked into it as of now, and I didn't really get the chance to touch into any other open source community. So I might be a little bit biased, but from what I can observe, I really like the TYPO3 community and I really like the project as well. So

Jeffrey McGuire  34:20
it's a totally fair answer. I mean, everybody's experiences their experience.

Yeah. I have a little segment in the podcast that I'm calling suggest a guest and I would like you to suggest who else should be on here a little bit like the Ice Bucket Challenge, but all you have to do is tell me who I should invite on here. What would make them an interesting guest you know why they're interesting? What what they're about?

Luisa  34:47
Yeah, that's like,

Jeffrey McGuire  34:49
I think three maybe

Luisa  34:51
three maybe Okay, um, they're probably all on your list already. Anyways, but still, my number one would still be Oliver Bartsch I think I told you about him before because I think he's one of the newer faces in TYPO3 as well. He has been pretty active before, but he now joined Benni's, Benni's company. And he's really actively contributing to the TYPO3 core. And he actually wanted to contribute more. And that's why he changed his job. So I think it would be really interesting to talk to another young folk in the community who's also really motivated. Yeah, let's be honest, most most of the people in the TYPO3 community aren't 24.

Jeffrey McGuire  35:30
It's, it's true. It's true. And the fact that there are a few younger faces are showing up is actually a great sign for the interestingness and the vitality of the community. So

Luisa  35:44
yeah, Yeah, obviously Mathias Bolt Lesniak cuz he's the one who's also pushing the TYPO3 mentorship program, and he's just basically whatever happens somewhere in the community, he's there. And he always knows about everything, and always has so many great new ideas. And I just really love how his spirit and how he goes about things. And he's really enthusiastic about TYPO3 So I think he's, you're probably going to talk to him anyways. Am I right?

Jeffrey McGuire  36:13
He's, a very good friend of mine. And, and he's also on the TYPO3 Association Board. And yes, he's he's, happily has a place on my list.

Luisa  36:24
And I think another one would be Rachel, cuz she just newly joined the board. And I think it would be really interesting to get her perspective, because she has lots of cool new ideas. And she actually really wants to drive things forward. And I think she would also be a really good addition to your podcast series.

Jeffrey McGuire  36:42
Now, her Rachel Foucard, right?

Luisa  36:45
Oh, it's not Rachel. I'm sorry. No, it's

Jeffrey McGuire  36:48
okay. And Rachel Foucard is a very interesting and very articulate person who really does have some some strong ideas. And, you know, she's a powerful woman in technology, doing the technical job and all of that. And she and I talked for more than an hour just last week for the podcast. So your wish is my command Luisa, you get you get a free fourth, a free fourth choice if you'd like.

Luisa  37:23
Okay, if I don't think a lot of people know him because he's my colleague. But I think Christiane Spool would be really interesting, because he's actually a PHP developer. And he just did his first TYPO3 project within our company. And I think that would also be really interesting to see what he might have to add about that, because he's really into the open source part. And he's also really engaged in the PHP community. So that might be a more technical standpoint, maybe.

Jeffrey McGuire  37:52
Right. And I'd love to get his perspective of being a being a PHP Dev and coming into working with TYPO3 and he's got a fresh perspective on on on it without too much old baggage or or such. That sounds like a great interview. That sounds great. I will hit you up for his contact information. Thank you so very much.

Okay. So this was Luisa Faßbender . Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. Thank you so much for your contributions to the community and your take on combining technical and non-technical activities to be a part of something bigger than all of us. Thank you. So very much. Good luck with your studies. And it's 2020 right now, so I don't know when I will see you in person. But I hope it's not too long.

Luisa  38:44
Yeah, same. Thank you for the chance to be on here. And thank you for your time.

Jeffrey McGuire  38:50
Great. Thanks, Teresa.

Luisa  38:51
Have a nice day.

Jeffrey McGuire  38:53
You. Thanks to the TYPO3 Association for sponsoring this podcast. Thank you, b13, and Stefanie Kreuzer for our logo. Merci beaucoup Patrick Gaumond, TYPO3 developer and musician extraordinaire for our theme music. Thanks again to today's guest. If you like what you heard, don't forget to subscribe in the podcast app of your choice and share application that TYPO3 community podcast with your friends and colleagues. If you didn't like it, please share it with your enemies.

Would you like to play along and suggest a guest for the podcast? Do you have questions or comments? reach out to us on Twitter @TYPO3podcast. You can find show notes, links and more information in our posts on TYPO3.org. Remember, open source software would not be what it is without you. Thank you all for your contributions.

Luisa  39:52
I think you're stuck

Jeffrey McGuire  40:02
Hello,

Luisa  40:02
Hey,

Jeffrey McGuire  40:05
that was my side apparently.

Luisa  40:07
Yeah, my one was working. You were kind of stuck in between.

Jeffrey McGuire  40:11
So,

um

Luisa  40:26
I don't want to say anything but

Jeffrey McGuire  40:29
yeah,

Luisa  40:30
it's like the most unflattering faces.

Jeffrey McGuire  40:35
That's kind of exciting. I wonder why it is. What's one thing that people would enjoy learning about you?

Luisa  40:43
Well, I don't know. What would you enjoy learning about me?

Jeffrey McGuire  40:47
Okay, next question.

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  • Content Publisher : Mathias Bolt Lesniak