Succesful second TYPO3 Association General Assembly

The General Assembly (GA) is first and foremost the occasion to introduce and formally decide on the Associations annual budget. Second to this are changes in the council of active members and changes in the Association's Board. There's of course also time reserved for questions, suggestions or comments from the Supporting Members.
This years GA was attended by a record amount of 40 supporting members, most of them representing well known TYPO3 integrating companies. Taken into account the trip most of them had to make to attent the meeting, their presence proves that the T3A can count on the commitment of it's members.

Compared to 2006 the T3A in 2007will spend an even larger part of her annual budget on development of -new core- Version 5.0, while also upholding financial support for the 4.x branch's release management. The 2007 budget also contains budget for typo3.org, a new project managed by Matthias Schreiber assisted by Silke Arend. Their goal is to rebuild the main developer resource to become a springboard for innovation, free flow of information and to foster collaboration between developers and potential sponsors. They will lead typo3.org to the next level.

The T3A Board has undergone some major personnel changes. Due to this was the urge to free the Active Members for their main tasks and create an executive board solely dedicated to managing the Association and improving it's structures, communication and web platforms.
So what has changed? Dominic Brander left the Board to dedicate himself to the TYPO3 Certification Team. Robert Lemke and Christian Jul Jensen left as Assessors and will from now on only spin their intellect on the new 5.0 branche. Newly voted in these positions are Jens Christian Mygent and Sander Vogels. Their main task will be uplifting all TYPO3 communication processes on to a higher level. Daniel Hinderink has moved to the position as Secretary, being replaced as Vice President by Juergen Egeling, active member and well known as the thriving power behind T3CON and the Developer Days. The new Board expects to be much more effective as an executive body.

Within the ranks of the GA's Active Member's only some minor changes took place. René 'DAM' Fritz has left the Active Members due to private reasons. In his place Mark 'WEC' Stephenson  was voted into the council. Mark has been a very active community member spreading TYPO3 in the US with his Web Empowered Church, promotional tours and the writing of a T3 book. As an Active Member we expect him to become even more effective in gaining solid ground for TYPO3 in the US.

In the past year the TYPO3 Association has shown significant growth in the number of Supporting Members, from 166 in the end of 2005 to currently 230. We can only be happy with this 40% increase in supporting members. More and more companies and individuals seem to realise that supporting the TYPO3 Association partly also guarantees the stability of their own business since the greater part of the annual budget goes to core-development. In the light of this we hope to welcome even more new members in 2007!