Sponsoring of Form Project Completed

Categories: Development Created by François Suter
I am very pleased to announce that the financing of the new FORM sponsored project has been completed. The main supporters of this project were a network of German universities.
I am very pleased to announce that the financing of the new FORM sponsored project has been completed. The main supporters of this project were a network of German universities. Although they could not raise the full amount themselves, other companies joined in and the full financing was finally achieved about a month ago. This was made possible thanks to the help and determination of many people. First of all Uschi Renziehausen and Thomas Schröder who never gave up gathering financing from the afore-mentioned network of universities. Ben van 't Ende, from Netcreators in the Netherlands, helped a lot in the background. After listening to Oliver Hader's talk at T3CON08, Ben Wardle, of Netefficiency in the UK, got in contact with me to know whether he could help financing the new FORM project. Finally Kian Gould, from AOE media in Germany, agreed to put up the rest of the money. In the meantime a donation had arrived from Egbert van der Hout, from CMS Works, also in the Netherlands. So the final sponsoring breaks down as:
  • Universität Erfurt, Fachhochschule Erfurt, Technische Universität Ilmenau, Fachhochschule Nordhausen, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar: 6450 EUR
  • Netefficiency: 2850 EUR
  • AOEmedia: 2000 EUR
  • CMS Works: 100 EUR
This first success also highlighted some problems and shortcomings which will be addressed in the future. In particular it seems important to have some kind of marketplace where potential sponsors can express their interest for a given project without actually donating money. This way sponsors could get in touch with each other and discuss how they could share the financing between themselves. Some administrative parts of the process need to be reviewed too. It appeared that public German institutions could not dondate to associations. Instead they have to finance the developers directly. Contact is also taken with the T3REORG team to give sponsoring a greater visibility in the future version of typo3.org. There's more to say and more projects to sponsor, so please refer to the sponsoring mailing list (typo3.sponsoring) which should see increased activity in the future and don't forget the other projects. Potential sponsors are encouraged to use the sponsoring mailing list to exchange their interest about projects until we have a better solution. Back to the FORM project I am very grateful to all involved in financing directly or indirectly. The new FORM object is planned for TYPO3 4.4, but will be available as a system extension before that, just follow its progress on Forge.