Today, every country—rich and poor—needs digitalization. Government administration, education, and every business rely on software and need to present themselves online. The Covid-19 crisis has only made this more urgent.
A Life-Changing Opportunity with TYPO3
Choosing a career in web programming is a great way to earn a decent living and join a global community of like-minded people. I have seen how becoming a web developer can be a life-changing opportunity for youngsters in developing countries.
In the TYPO3 community, we are working with the most competitive open source CMS. It is flexible, performant, and secure, and the best choice for many sectors, from government and universities to corporations and companies of all kinds. Yet, TYPO3 remains little known and used in many parts of the world. Changing that will be a benefit to everyone.
A Journey to National Capacity Building
Facing this global opportunity, the TYPO3 Association went where TYPO3 has never gone before. Two years ago we started a journey that soon found its goal: To bring TYPO3 and the TYPO3 community into new parts of the world.
It started in Africa, and little by little it evolved. With the creation of the TYPO3 Community Expansion Committee, and later meeting with web development communities in several African countries, the assistance for the government of Rwanda was the high-point thus far. Our collaboration led to their strategic adoption of TYPO3 and national capacity building.
We have continued to reach out to more and more developers and web agencies from different countries. Now, it’s possible to take an important new step, the one that we are happy to announce now.
Introducing the TYPO3 Mentorship Program
The International TYPO3 Mentorship Program will introduce new web developers to TYPO3, and help them start using it through a direct, personalized, one-to-one learning process facilitated by experienced mentors from our community. It is targeted at web developers from countries where TYPO3 does not have yet a strong presence. The main goal is to expand TYPO3, the developer community, and the professional CMS market.
Through the course of three months of weekly mentoring sessions the TYPO3 mentees will learn how to build their own TYPO3 website and start using it professionally in their current companies or as freelancers.
From a basic understanding of TYPO3, they will be able to develop their knowledge and to participate in the community, asking questions and sharing their knowledge locally and globally.
Starting in Africa and Latin America
The program has been prepared over the past two months. We have reached out to development communities in Africa and Latin America, and raised their interest in TYPO3. We have collected mentee applications and performed interviews to understand their experience and motivation.
Today, we have confirmed participants from Chile, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Benin, and South Africa. Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Botswana, and Burundi are countries from which we expect the next wave of registrations. Our outreach activities continue.
Please contact us if you can help to establish a dialogue to promote TYPO3 in other countries.
Professional TYPO3 Mentors, World-Wide
We have also found a first group of knowledgeable mentors. They are TYPO3 developers with experience as trainers, teachers, mentors, and coaches. They share the mentees’ diverse international background and come from five different countries. Because we plan for the program to expand, we will need more people as mentors too. If you are interested in becoming one, please reach out to us.
The mentors who commit to the program will have to dedicate at least 2 hours per week for each mentee for 3 months. The effort will bring new people into the community and make TYPO3 spread to new countries.
Help Expand the Mentoring Budget
The mentors will be financially compensated, but the current budget is quite limited, allowing only 8 mentor-mentee pairs to be supported through the program. Since we already have a larger number of interested mentees, we will have to find solutions that will allow more people to start their path to learn TYPO3. In order to achieve this, we look for direct financial support from our community. If you are interested in sponsoring the program, please contact us for more information.
We already received the generous support of SkillDisplay. They have offered their platform as a place to organize the learning process and to keep track of progress.
Coordinated by an International Group
The committee that has coordinated and organized the activities so far consists of
- Olivier Dobberkau
- Mathias Bolt Lesniak
- Tymoteusz Motylewski
- Alina Fleser
- Rachel Foucard
- Daniel Homorodean
As with the TYPO3 Community Expansion Committee itself, the group is open to more contributors, especially in the activities involving the promotion of TYPO3 in new countries.
We will keep you posted as the program evolves, with summaries in the TYPO3 newsletter and a new dedicated presentation page on typo3.org.
If you would like to get involved in any way, feel free to reach out to me directly at daniel.homorodean(at)typo3.org.
Copyediting: Mathias Bolt Lesniak • Proofreading: Tony Lush
