Report from the Board QSA—April 2020

Categories: Community, Association Created by Mathias Bolt Lesniak
Photo of computer screen showing video meeting.
The TYPO3 Association Board met online Monday and Tuesday 20–21 April, 2020. The topics included preparing the General Assembly, visions for the TYPO3 Company and Supervisory Board elections, as well as reviewing the budget, member management, ongoing projects, and disaster recovery plans.

Although the Board meets online every two weeks throughout the year, it is necessary with longer physical meetings for in-depth and strategic discussions. These two-day meetings (called QSAs) happen three to four times a year. After this year’s first QSA was canceled due to a severe storm over Germany, and the alternative date was canceled due to the COVID-19 (Corona) crisis, we decided to hold this meeting online.

All board members were able to take part, and we organized it as 90-minute plenary sessions followed by work on individual tasks or meetings in small groups.

Preparing the General Assembly

We spent much time preparing the general assembly, not only laying out the agenda and creating one common presentation, but also testing the technical platform and voting technology.

The chosen software, GoToWebinar, worked well, and we created a sign-up form and sent out unique meeting links to ensure that the participants of the General Assembly were all members of the Association and eligible for voting.

Results of the Board and BCC Elections

The elections closed a couple of days before our meeting, and we went through the results together. Boris Hinzer, Alain Veuve, and Mathias Bolt Lesniak accepted their reelections. We were happy to see that we had a new board member and we reached out to Rachel Foucard to receive her acceptance as a new board member.

We invited Rachel to the next ordinary Board meeting, where we will assign positions and responsibilities.

While Rachel was voted in, Ric van Westhreenen was voted out. He has made a great contribution through his responsibility for the TYPO3 trademark and as Vice President. We will work with him to make sure tasks and responsibilities are transferred to others in the board.

Supervisory Board Elections

Over the last year, the Supervisory Board has done a lot to define its role. The members are involved in a number of important tasks to ensure the continued success of the TYPO3 Company. 

In this situation, continuity is important and we unanimously decided to reelect the current Supervisory Board until the General Assembly in April 2022: 

  • Olivier Dobberkau
  • Ric van Westhreenen
  • Stefan Busemann

The Supervisory Board oversees the TYPO3 Company on behalf of the owner, the TYPO3 Association. It is elected for two years by the TYPO3 Association Board at the General Assembly.

Policy for Committees and Official Teams

We decided to create a working group with members from the Board and the community to work on policies for teams and committees. Please feel free to contact the Board if you would like to be part of such a group.

Many parts of our organization are lacking clear decision-making processes and responsibilities, as well as rules for empowerment and disempowerment of positions. We believe this unclarity can cause unnecessary uncertainty and disagreement in the association, community, and company, if left unaddressed.

Difficult Member Management

We decided to initiate a project to improve the systems and processes for member management.

The management process and the low quality of the member data is causing problems for the Association and reduces member satisfaction. For example, changes of data are not automatically synchronized between the back office system and our CRM (Hubspot), meaning that members might in some cases not be assigned correct benefits. For agency members, email addresses are often general info@ or invoices@ addresses, which means the Association will sometimes only reach an uninterested secretary or accountant, and not the person responsible for the membership.

Formalizing and Communicating our Vision for the TYPO3 Company

It is important to the Board to provide a clear vision to the Company and we think it will lead to better collaboration between the Company and the Association and the community, and clearer understanding of each other’s roles.

During 2020, we will work to formalize our expectations and communicate them to the Company and the community.

Budget Adjustments Due to the Corona Crisis in 2020

The COVID-19 (Corona) crisis means that travel and hotel costs will be much lower than expected in 2020. We are asking budget owners to look for ways to spend their budgets in alternative ways. Changes in the budgets must be approved and unused funds can be reallocated to new budget ideas in a second budget round for 2020.

We will also ask for the budget tool at reimbursement.typo3.com to be extended so it is easier to get an overview of unused budgets.

Documenting the Board’s Internal Processes

We started a process to improve the documentation of our internal processes. This will result in a handbook for Board members and a calendar workflow that will help us onboard new members.

Central IT Disaster Recovery Planning

At the moment, there is no central documentation of what disaster recovery plans exist within our organization. We will work to create a central list of information technology services, their disaster recovery plans, and who is responsible for them, and how they are expected to report incidents.

If a disaster recovery plan is missing, it must be created.

 
Proofreading: Tony Lush