TYPO3 COOP – University gathering was held in Darmstadt

For the first time this meeting was held in the center of Germany in the city of Darmstadt, allowing the participants to stick their heads together. On both days there were conference style talks, covering a range of topics.

Mathias Schreiber (TYPO3 GmbH) gave the attendees an insight into the current state of the TYPO3 project and the TYPO3 Inc. with his interesting and entertaining talk “University Package – Cooperation of universities and TYPO3”. He pointed out how universities can get in contact with the core team and which other means of communication exist.

Olivier Dobberkau and Sebastian Kreideweiß spoke about “How can universities help the TYPO3 ecosystem”, covering a range of topics from organizational changes up to financial help or training needs. We learned that there is a substantial market share of 60% of the German universities actually using TYPO3 as their main CMS.

Other talks which were held that first day, covered how FAL can be extended for the use and needs of large installations (Andreas Wolf and Michael Lang, h_da), the „TYPO3-Multiportal“ talk described the project of three universities from Mecklenburg-West Pomerania to relaunch their sites in a collaborative attempt (Katrin Beez, Christian Gauger, Mirco Leyh and Christian Bülter), and insights on how agile project management can be achieved with the restrictions of the public procurement law (Magnus Schubert and Patrick Lobacher).

After that it was time to socialize at the Eugen-Bracht-Villa - of course with the help of Ebbelwoi…

The second day started with an insight on how the University of Ulm managed their relaunch (Klaus Fumy). Klaus presented 200 very entertaining slides on how the relaunch took place – reading with assigned roles included. Next up was a talk covering “TYPO3 Deployment” (Alex Kellner), which gave the audience an impression on what  it needs to put up a full blown deployment setup for TYPO3.

After a short break the focus shifted towards more collaboration, as all the attendees were asked to participate in a “World Café” to work simultaneously on a road towards a “TYPO3 University Package”. In just a little over an hour’s time the magic was happening with forming 14 groups and letting them brainstorm over 7 unique topics in two rooms. After 10 minutes the groups were asked to move on to the next table thus topic. That created in total about 107 hours of project work – quite impressive. The topics covered the range on what to focus for an UP, how the financing can be achieved, how the universities can take more influence on the strategic development of TYPO3 asf.

After a short break a panel discussion on “How can the universities improve the collaboration with agencies” was held. Olivier Dobberkau (dkd Internet Service GmbH), Jochen Weiland (jweiland GmbH), Alex Kellner & Sandra Pohl (both in2code GmbH), Klaus Fumy (Uni Ulm), Daniel Fehrle (Uni Hohenheim) and Ralf Garten (HS Osnabrück) participated in that.

As a final roundup Magnus Schubert (pluswerk AG) had the opportunity to present the results of the world café. He managed to sum up 107 hours of work in 15 minutes and just had a little over time.

The University Package (UP) will be a best practice approach for universities. It will aim at a better and stronger involvement of the educational sector in the TYPO3 project. To achieve this, several workgroups were formed to continue the work towards a better participation, collaboration and exertion of influence based mainly on the results of the world café.

Next year’s meeting will be held in Darmstadt again, allowing a retrospective on the results and planning the next steps and meetings. Meetings will be held on a regular basis from now on. So stay tuned for next years TYPO3 University Day 2017.

If you would like to participate, be sure to contact some of the people on #educationalinstitutes or #university-package on <link https: typo3.slack.com>typo3.slack.com.

Thanks a lot to all the participants, special thanks to the Hochschule Darmstadt for having us and of course to the whole organization team, which were Michael Lang, Ivonne Nordhausen and Marion Reisert-Eichelbaum and everybody around them making this happen.

The website can be found <link https: www.h-da.de forschung veranstaltungen tagungen-und-konferenzen typo3-treffen>www.h-da.de/forschung/veranstaltungen/tagungen-und-konferenzen/typo3-treffen/.