The first 100 Days of the T3A Expert Advisory Board

Defining the Schedule

The new bylaws introduce a whole new process of budgeting. 2013's budget is not decided anymore by the T3A board and the T3A steering committee (which doesn't exist anymore), but it will be more democratic. As soon as we have all budget applications the EAB will publish them and ask the members in a poll which budgets they prioritize. The outcome of this poll will be the base of the budget negotiations the Expert Advisory Board will do with the applicants thereafter. This is a whole new process and needs to be organized and planned thoroughly. We already communicated the budget schedule in an earlier news article (<link http: typo3.org news article save-the-date-for-your-budget-application>typo3.org/news/article/save-the-date-for-your-budget-application/).

Defining Fields of Responsibility

We are not only implementing a whole new procedure to come up with the yearly budget plans. There will be a very clear reporting from the budget receivers and monitoring by the Expert Advisory Board. This is to help, foster and guide T3A financed teams throughout the whole process until the end of a budget period and have better reportings also towards the T3A members. This reporting and monitoring will be started already in the next weeks for the current budgets and built up until the next GA, so that the process is up and running for the next budget period. To realize a good communication between the Expert Advisory Board and the budget receivers all budgets have been arranged into "Fields of Responsibility". The EAB members stay in close contact with their dedicated budgets from the FORs they serve. These are the FORs and their representatives right now:

• Events: Olivier Dobberkau
• Phoenix & FLOW3: Michael Stucki & Peter Pröll (interim)
• Extbase: Jonas Felix
• TYPO3 v4/v6: Jan-Hendrik Heuing & Olivier Dobberkau
• Security: Jonas Felix
• Server: Peter Pröll
• Certification: Peter Pröll
• TER/PSL/DocTeam: Jan-Hendrik Heuing
• MarCom: Olivier Dobberkau
• Administration & Legal: Peter Pröll

In their FORs the EAB members already touched base with the current budget receivers in conference calls or personal meetings.

Defining Communications

Besides the personal contacts of the EAB towards the budget receivers we have established some more communication channels:

• a mail contact address (<link>eab(at)typo3.org),
• we will have regular reports like this one here at typo3.org,
• you can follow the public part of our work of the EAB on forge (<link http: forge.typo3.org projects t3a-eab-public>forge.typo3.org/projects/t3a-eab-public),
• most important information will be linked from our EAB website (<link http: association.typo3.org expert-advisory-board>association.typo3.org/expert-advisory-board),

Defining Targets and Strategies

Besides monthly conference calls and the constitutional meeting we already have had a two day live meeting in Basel in May. That has given us the opportunity to start thinking about the overall strategy and targets for the TYPO3 Association as well as the TYPO3 project.  One strategical target is defined as "community over code", meaning that we want to reduce paid work and to foster so called enabling costs (e.g. costs related to code sprints like travelling, accommodation, etc.). This will be fostered by displaying enabling costs from work time costs in budget applications and a separate decision on the granted amount of each. Budgets that enable as much people as possible and are dedicated to the idea of "community over code" will have higher chances. This is not only based on the idea to foster the community but it turned out that voluntary work combined with code sprints is much more fun and highly productive. As the EAB is brand new we only have the bylaws as a base to work with. Currently we are working on the rules of procedure to have in written the nitty gritty of all tasks the EAB has to face throughout the year. They will be the guideline for the EAB work of the next years. It is a lot of fun planning and organizing all the polling, new budget processes, strategies, reporting, planning and at the same time we are all happy that most of this is done to be reused thus has not to be done again and again every year :).

Defining Action

Besides defining the EAB itself and strategies that touch the T3A's 2013 budget, the EAB also is acting in a more global context.  We asked the marketing team to initiate a FLOW3 Challenge to find the best three Applications based on FLOW3 and reward them with price money (raised through sponsoring). Another campaign of the EAB will be a TYPO3 Association market survey. We will collect anonymous data of TYPO3 service providing companies on salaries, prices, trends. The report is planned to be free of cost for our members as service and with costs for non-members. Some more ideas are already in the pipeline but not that concrete to tell about them, yet.

Personnel changes

Much quicker than we have thought we would have there are personal changes in the EAB. Patrick Lobacher steps back from his position, because his overall workload in the last time was much too high and he wants to concentrate on himself, his family and his company. Of course he will continue to actively support the TYPO3 project wherever he can. As for the EAB this means that there will be an extraordinary election during the summer months to find a successor for his position in the EAB. The TYPO3 Association Board will start a call for nomination and communicate all further details related to the election soon. If you want to nominate yourself for the EAB position you are very welcome to do so. The EAB asks every nominee to keep in mind that the position requires quite some time invest, as you can tell from our 100-days-report. We have monthly conference calls, there are four to six live meetings every year and quite some work for every EAB member in between. The successor of Patrick will have a mandate until the general assembly in early 2014.