Results of the TYPO3 Education Committee sprint: Visions and actual plans

At the end of last week the very young <link>TYPO3 Education Committee met in Gemünd / Eifel, Germany. Besides members of the committee (Boris Hinzer, Moritz Krauss, Patrick Lobacher and Peter Pröll) it was Christopher Hlubek from the Flow/Neos-Team who joined us and has committed himself to be the latest member of the committee.
The TYPO3 Committee has been founded to foster the certification programme and to make it easier for newcomers to dig into TYPO3. We already got the <link https: typo3.org news article certification-preparation-workshop-at-typo3camp-bremen _top>Certification Preparation Workshop going which will take place for the second time at the TYPO3Camp in Bremen on August 8th, 14:30h (<link http: shop.typo3.org certification>Get a ticket for the workshop right here). Now we want to come up with a TYPO3 Campus. You want to know what a TYPO3 campus is about? So did we :). That is what this sprint was about: Coming up with the concept. The great nature and the silence of the Eifel provided a great setting for inspirational work. Travel and hotel costs were financed by the TYPO3 Association and the food was sponsored by <link http: www.eifel-online.com>eifel-online, <link http: www.plus-werk.com>+werk, <link http: www.web-vision.de>web-vision and <link http: alinbu.net typo3>Alinbu. Thanks for your support! Setting complete … we were able to start:
We quickly decided to use the Walt-Disney-Method for our sprint, which divides the planning work in three stages: Vision, criticism and realism. It starts with a visionary stage to come up with and gather all great ideas. It has been quite hard to stick to a visionary point of view and keep away from downsides and implications that come with some visions. Fortunately there was always one of us prepared to hit the “don’t-criticize-now-it’s-vision-time-buzzer” right away and thus it was a great visionary Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. We came up with quite some ideas surrounding how an ideal campus would look: Newcomers will find their way into TYPO3 easily. Professionals will find an ongoing training environment to stay up to date with the latest technologies. Professional training providers will be involved and everything comes with a great learning community on- and offline. In addition to add a little fun to the experience we had quite some gamification visions too. The second stage of the Walt-Disney-Method is the critics stage. That means tearing to shreds all the visions, find downsides and negative implications. Basically all that was forbidden in the first stage. We spent quite some time on Friday afternoon with that and separating visions from criticism really is a very effective method and makes even criticism fun. At least kind of … to be honest, it is not easy to switch to party pooping mode after creating a great vision :).
Friday night right after dinner we completed a 3h-15km-up-and-downhill-night-hike through the National Park with a forest guide sponsored by <link http: alinbu.net typo3>Alinbu which literarily got us going and prepared us for the last stage: Now it was time to sort our visions, take in and respect the criticism and come up with realistic plans and solutions. We identified the short term goals that can be started in 2014 and 2015. Of course one single morning session is not enough to get into the fine details so we made a rough plan and now it’s time for the realization. For that we are going to come up with task forces for the sub projects and we are looking for contributors who would like to get involved in creating and building a great TYPO3 campus: Starting a mentorship programme - We have a plan for this and it needs a mentorship programme coordinator. Someone who is not actually a mentor but coordinates newcomers and mentors, collects feedback and is the first point of contact. Gamification - We came up with some great plans how gamification can be involved throughout the whole concept and vision of the TYPO3 Campus. And we already found convenient ways to integrate gamification right from the start. If you love to deal with gamification, maybe the gamification task force is the place to be? Curriculum and Certification - The currently existing certification programme will be extended in near future. Following on from the certification for integrators a developer certification is now being developed. We also have some nice ideas about further professional qualifications too. If certification is something that might be of interest for you, what about joining our curriculum task force or the TYPO3 Certification Team? Infrastructure & Technology - TYPO3 is a great CMS but it is not an e-learning platform. We are now about to evaluate e-learning platforms and see if they match our requirements. Furthermore we do want to provide training-VMs and online TYPO3-training-environments. If you are the server tech guy and love to dig into systems then our infrastructure task force is waiting for you and you will work in coordination with the TYPO3 Server Team. Events - We do not plan to have only an online experience. If you are into event planning and event organization, feel very welcome to join the event task force and work in coordination with the TYPO3 Event Committee. Training Marketplace - The TYPO3 Campus will also come with a trainer marketplace, however the concept has not yet been drawn up and right after that it’ll need implementing too! If you are interested why not join the marketplace task force and help create something awesome?
As you can see there is quite some work ahead and we are all freaking excited about it. The overall concept is just rocking and now it all depends on help from

YOU

to get it going. Don’t be shy, just contact <link>Peter. There is work for everybody no matter what qualification you have. You will start as a contributor to the TYPO3 Education Committee and everybody who works with us on a regular and reliable basis will become a member!