News from the General Assembly of the T3A

Last Friday the yearly General Assembly (GA) of the TYPO3 Association (T3A) took place in Amsterdam. Generally at the GA the book keeping of the past year is presented and financial forecasts are made. The results of the teams are presented and changes in the ranks of both the Board and the Active Members are announced and voted on. About 30 Supporting Members attended this years GA.

Most surprising news was that Kasper Skarhøj remains on as President of the TYPO3 Association and of course was voted into the job. So the only change in the board of directors was the resignation of Daniel Hinderink from the office of Secretary. The position goes to Gina Steiner, who, among other things, organises the TYPO3 Developer Days.

The TYPO3 Association has increased the 2008 budget for the development of TYPO3 4. x and 5.0 with a huge amount to almost 200% of the 2007 budget. The goal is to speedup the development. To raise the money for this the T3A will undertake the following measures. First of course the acquisition of Supporting Members is supposed to be reinforced strongly in 2008.
In 2007 the member number was raised in the course of the year from 230 to 300.  For 2008, the TYPO3 Association has set an ambitious goal to attract 50 new single members and 50 new company members.
In addition to gain more funding the fee is raised for company memberships from ? 500 to ? 700 Euro. Introduced in addition to this is a 'plus-membership', which fee will cost ? 2.000 Euro.  Reason for that is the plain outspoken wish of some businesses to be able to support the TYPO3 Association with a higher sum without targeting this money to a certain project.
Next to the contributions of the Supporting Members,  most important source of income in 2007 was the TYPO3 conference T3CON07. After three years in Karlsruhe the conference will move to Berlin in 2008, where the main organiser will be Stefan Bauer.  

In the area development the T3A plans to publish version 4.2 the next month and 4.3 by the end of the year. In 2007, especially the opening of the Core Mailinglist contributed enormously to the development of the 4.x branch.  
Also with TYPO3 5.0, the T3A booked enormous progress.  Robert Lemke did spend almost the entire year full time at TYPO3 5.0 development and published in February the official website for  the PHP-Framework now branded FLOW3, which will be the fundament for TYPO3 5.0. A final release of FLOW3 should be ready in the course of this year. Following this development TYPO3 5.0 is supposed to be completed in 2009 and will be presented at T3CON09.  This year Robert Lemke will be supported even more strongly than previous year by Karsten Dambekalns, who even has decided to move to Robert's  Moreover the 5.0-Team will be enlarged gradually in order to accelerate the development even more.  

The TYPO3-Security-Team has outspoken the wish to organise a new event by the name of T3SEC that should solely focus on matters of security around TYPO3 but have doubts if they will manage this in 2008.
The certification team was able to define the basic structures in 2007 for the certification process and institute but had problems finding a partner to facilitate test locations and so on. Also in the field of development of the exam software there were major complications. Probably the first tests will be performed just on paper. The team was renewed in 2007 because of departing members having no time anymore to spend on community work. This seems to become a wider problem in all Open Source communities were the success of the project causes a hugh workload for community members in their professional businesses. But the Certification Team still plans to start with certification this year, might it be in digital or plain paper format.

Next years' GA will take place at 20 March in Munich, Germany. Hope to see you there!