This Week in TYPO3 (Week 4, 2014)

Categories: Community, This week in TYPO3 Created by ben van 't ende
The TYPO3 CMS team reports that major work is being done on performance and the Neos team is engaged in localisation. Furthermore marketing plans for 2014, Olivier Dobberkau AKA the Reverend Neverend shares his insights and a message from our Ukranian TYPO3 friends.
Week Ending: January 24, 2014

Marketing for 2014

Last Wednesday the marketing team met for the first time in 2014 in Frankfurt. Besides monthly virtual meetings, the marketing team also meets some four times a year to connect in the real world. After a successful 2013 with as a highlight the Marketing Sprint, including the communication workshop, the marketing team is looking forward to continue with it's work in 2014. Plans for 2014 include agency meet ups to get feedback from companies about our products. A successful agency meet up in Switzerland inspired the marketing team to take further action. The team discussed plans regarding CMS Garden, sponsoring, marketing material, continued communication workshops, strategy meetings, evangelism, communication as such and a typo3.org relaunch focused on a new fresh and responsive design. The full plans will be unfolded in an article beginning of next week.

Support our friends in Ukraine

The TYPO3 community has a small but active community in the Ukraine. As you probably all read or have seen in some way on the news the Ukraine is fighting for freedom and democracy. The images and video's coming in are pretty disturbing to see. There is not really a lot we can do from where we live except sharing the information. Andriy Kushnarov lives near Kiev. You might know him from the agile workshop he did at the TYPO3 conference some years back. Andriy tells us what is going on in his country. How is the situation for you? Thank you very much for asking. As for me and my family we're doing well. All the action happens in the city center, and we live far from it so it's OK here. On the other hand everybody is really worried, because of the situation in our country. It's not a local Kiev problem. I hope people outside of Ukraine are informed correctly about the situation inside Ukraine. Are most TYPO3 folks ok? Most of TYPO3 people I know not in Kiev, so I guess they are OK. How would you describe your situation in general? From my understanding the last thing you guys want is to go back under Russian regime. Can you say a little bit about that? The situation is really complicated. It started in November 2013, when our president decided to make an agreement with Russia, but people started to protest. Most of Ukraine as I understand it now would like to move more to European Union, not to Russia. The main action (confrontation with police) started on January 16 after our president signed out some laws which restricted protests. People now see our president as a dictator. At the moment it looks like opposition and the president decided to negotiate. So I hope you understand from my brief description that first it was because the president wants to move to Russia, but people want to move to Europe. But now it's more about crushing current dictator regime. What would be the best resource for us to read up on what is going on? There is really a lot of information (mostly in Russian) now and some times even I don't know which is correct. I guess this one is good (maybe you can use google translate): <link http: zyalt.livejournal.com>zyalt.livejournal.com/983675.html Our friends from Meet Magento have also written about the topic here: <link http: www.meet-magento.com support-our-friends-in-ukraine>www.meet-magento.com/2014/01/support-our-friends-in-ukraine/

Interview with Oliver Dobberkau

Tell us a little bit about yourself. My name is Olivier Dobberkau and I will turn 46 this coming april. I live in Frankfurt Germany. I am the founder and CEO of <link http: dkd.de>dkd Internet Service GmbH. I dedicate a lot of my time to TYPO3 and open-source. I love to communicate and to express my thoughts constantly searching for answers. Whilst I might be not the most sportive person anymore I love sports, such as Soccer and Golf. I feel very privileged to be able to travel and to visit new places in the world. In the TYPO3 community you act a lot with your alter ego Reverend Neverend. What can the reverend do that Olivier cannot do? Well the Reverend alter ego kind of happened to me. Its not that I created it myself. Kasper did a Podcast at the Developer Days long time ago and asked me if I could do some kind of a vox-pop interviews with the attendants of the event. I guess I was heavily inspired by Borat and another TYPO3 Pod cast from the snowboard tour starring Michael Conley from Denmark. I guess you can find the pod cast in the video section of typo3.org. To come back to your question: I guess that the Reverend is a some kind of a mascot type of character. He is allowed to criticize things because he is so full of passion and belief for TYPO3. But he is also some kind of a fool catching all the crazy zeitgeist stuff around him. Beside of being the guy sitting in the confession seat, he relies on TSREF to help him to rule on misbehaving of his community members. At TYPO3 events he is the kind of bad role model that opens up the dance floor for a crowd of Nerds. I think that Olivier is the lesser evil twin-brother of the Reverend. You have been in the Expert Advisory Board since the beginning. The EAB was initiated in an effort to create more transparency. What problems did you encounter on the road to transparency and what is there to celebrate? I started being a member of the TYPO3 Association from the very beginning with my company. Through the time the TYPO3 Association evolved into an organization with many tasks (outspoken and non-outspoken ones). At some time the T3A decided to change its Bylaws to enable their members to participate in the process of creating a common direction. With this participation idea transparency entered the world of the T3A. Such a cultural change created expectations that the active staff could not always handle. I think that this is a normal pattern that happens. What I want to say is that problems are often more to be found in the lack of communication then in the problem itself. You have nominated yourself for the position of president of the TYPO3 Association. That means a shift from an advisory role to a leadership role from my perspective, although this might not be how people perceive this. What can you say about the role of the board, a role that has been regarded as doing the boring work? I have nominated myself because of so many reasons. One of them is that the T3A needs to continue on its way of constant change. As an organization we need to comply with the expectations of all involved in our activities. The current Board and the EAB have identified fields of actions where we can improve our daily doing. For 2014 we have agreed to seek for a executive secretary that will ensure that ideas will be put into action. This will lead to a gain of momentum for all involved. If you allow me one remark, I think that we are all gifted in working with voluntary people. They have so much devotion to the things they work for. Unfortunately all our time is limited by so many factors. I see that the T3A needs to be able to offer some help here to those that share the same spirit. Its our task to be at help for all those more formal things. I would not call them boring, but mature if you see my point here. For 2014 I hope to be able to inspire others to join the TYPO3 Association, as members, as participants of events, as coders in the projects and so on. If you define leadership by the ability to inspire, help and work on common ideas then I admit that I choose to be a leader in the T3A.
Yours truly and Olivier The TYPO3 Association is getting on track in 2014. Like mentioned in the <link http: typo3.org news article get-on-track-in-2014>article the T3A plans to finish tasks they started. At the same time the association also wants to get closer to the community. There has been some distance between the association and the community. In what way do you envision those two coming closer together? Well I guess that the task-list of the TYPO3 Association will never be zero. Personally i do not see that much of a distance between the T3A and the TYPO3 Community. Maybe we need to be more clear on the things that you can expect from such an organization like the T3A. Maybe we need to work on that definition of community too. I think that there are so many people that actually belong to our community. If people join the T3A then I guess its because they want to show their belonging to the community for what I ever reasons they have. I will certainly work on the topic on how the T3A can listen to all. In the board of the T3A we hope to relaunch our service offerings to our members in this year. We also plan to actively work on the community management. We look to invite our members to strategy workshops for the products. I personally would like to see a reviving of the committees where the decision are taken by the ones involved in the matter. 2014 is going to be an exciting year. And if remember right there will be lots of reason to celebrate. With all the tasks waiting there, we should not forget the joy of being such a great and outstanding community of friends around great software products.