T3DD12: Go Share An Adventure

presentation on slideshare: www.slideshare.net/benvantende/t3dd12-keynote-12536785

I am Ben.

Welcome to all of you here in Munich. You can really feel at home here in the city that saved over 4 million Euro's implementing Open Source in the form of the Linux Desktop. You may even feel more at home with the bavarian beer.

It is great to see all these familiar faces and also many not so familiar faces. Great you are here and I am looking forward to talk with as many of you as possible in the coming days. The same goes for the members of the core development team (rise up). They are not rockstars. If you have any questions just ask.

I come kind of empty-handed, but warm-hearted. I am not here to announce a new feauture nor have I organised a contest, I did not design the visuals. I am here to tie some knots or loosen some knots and give you some insight in the big picture. If something is bothering you let me know.

What we are going to talk about is mainly based on the new branding, about our identity as TYPO3 community.

[slide: The Go Anywhere, Do Anything CMS]

Slogan: The Go Anywhere, Do Anything CMS.

This slogan is here to accompany the new branding effort. It says:

• Grab TYPO3 and go on an adventure.

• Take on the quest of changing or strengthening something in your organization with TYPO3.

• Feel proud to work for TYPO3 or work with TYPO3.

The slogan is aimed at all users of TYPO3. End-users, clients, companies, free-lancers.

Of course TYPO3 is still the Enterprise CMS, but TYPO3 fits many other purposes as well. Surely an enterprise is an adventure as well, but in a rather narrow spectrum. We see praise all around for the almost unlimited extendability of TYPO3. The multi-purpose nature of TYPO3 only seems to expand more currently with FLOW3, Fluid and Phoenix, our new CMS, around the corner. This is exciting and feels like nothing less then an adventure in our TYPO3 universe.

About: ben van 't ende

I have had my share of failure in the past, before my community manager life and I have recognized the essence of lessons from a major fail how nasty it might have been at the time experiencing it. At no point in time success is guaranteed. Consider the road to success as an adventure paved with failure. Failure is where we learn to do it better next time with that experience in mind.

Failing we do in the TYPO3 eco-system as well. We are a huge community where mistakes are made in every corner. As a person, as a community manager I have learned that we can only progress if we keep a conversation going and not linger to much in the realm of people that told us so.

For what ever reason the conversation does not always occur. The conversation can only come to life when we respect each other and try to understand the motivation that moves the other person. I have come across quite some disrespectful comments lately. These comments are useless when they are not in a conversation, but only trown over the fence so to speak.

We can learn from our conversations with others and whether we agree or disagree we are participating in a process.

Sometimes when the conversation does not take place I hope that I as a community manager get word of it and can help out and step in to get the conversation going again. Communication is key for participation.

My talk is loosely built upon Rasmus Skoldjan's branding concept for TYPO3. Rasmus is like Kasper from Denmark. Rasmus was very involved in TYPO3 in the early days, was leader of the design team and was largely responsible for the logo and early branding and he is back!

The branding strategy we use is built on the Caregiver Archetype and consists of three parts. Body, Mind and Soul. Every archetype consists of these parts and you can easily recognise the BODY/MIND/SOUL all through the world. Choosing an archetype helps us visualise what we are and remember who we are. There are archetypes like hero, sorcerer etc.

TYPO3 is not a hero, maybe to some of you in your daily life, but not in general. TYPO3 can work magic for sure, but according to the values installed to TYPO3 from the very beginning by Kasper we are most closely related to the Caregiver.

One inspirational example of a caregiver is Ben Kenobi from Starwars.

So....the caregiver archetype is an inspirational basis for speaking with one voice, caring about TYPO3, the people that work with TYPO3 and it is about finding inspiration as a foundation for us as a community to keep smiling and thriving in the future.

It is about excellent programming, structure we offer as building blocks and our common feeling we want the software we produce and maintain to be shared by many and cared for by our community.

SOUL

[slide: Soul]

The brand soul is the emotions we put into our products and the emotions we’d like to see when people experience TYPO3.

Following the values embedded into the organization by Kasper from the beginning, we focus on sharing, caring, generousity, empathy and kindness.

This means holding ourselves to these standards of compassion in all aspects of working with TYPO3.

MIND

[slide: Mind]

The mind let's us structure the world around us.

The brand mind is the intellectual reason for the brand to exist. It is how we make the TYPO3 brand stand out in the mind of the person experiencing TYPO3.

We make tools for communicating within a structure, we make building blocks for creating something powerful for our users.

TYPO3 should be recognized for it's power as an intelligently made product. We provide bricks to enable people to create that, which will be valuable to people.

BODY

[slide: Body]

The brand body is about how we materialize our thinking.

The brand body is our products and the experiences people have with the products.

This connects with our mission statement, to jointly innovate excellent free software enabling people to communicate.

So after this little introduction stating Why I am Here a question to you. Why are you here?

[slide: Why Am I Here]

Why Am I Here?

So why are you here?

Ask the audience why they are here.

[slide: participate!]

Ladies and Gentlemen of the TYPO3 community, PARTICIPATE!

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, participation would be it. The long term benefits of participation have been proven by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own experience.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your community--oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your community until they have faded.

The real troubles in your projects are likely things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you one lazy Thursday afternoon.

Do one thing everyday that you didn't think would work.

Don't waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind.

Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old design docs, throw away your old flame wars.

Don't feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your project. Others will tel you.

Maybe you'll release, maybe you won't, maybe you'll be forked, maybe you won't, maybe you'll be obsolete by 2020, maybe you'll be powering the White House in 2015. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either. Enjoy your community, use it every way you can.

Communicate, even if it's only with the two other people who care about your project.

Keep the README up to date, even if no one ever reads it.

Do NOT read IT magazines, they will only make you feel angry.

Get to know your fellow Open Sourcers, you never know what they'll be contributing to your code.

Be nice to your TYPO3 friends; they are the best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that people come and go, but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when your codebase was young.

Respect your peers

Don't expect anyone else to maintain your code. Maybe you have a documentation team, maybe you have some great extbase programmers; but you never know when either one might get a mouse arm.

Don't mess too much with your website, or by the time you're out of beta, it will look like Geocities.

Be careful whose advice you take, but be patient with those who supply it.

But trust me on the participation.

Inspired by nerdchic's post to GSoC mentor list:
http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/730/

Original sun screen version:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column,0,5909206,full.column

BODY

[slide: BODY]

1. typo3.org
   The relaunch project was historical from it's inception 5 or 6 years ago and only shows how difficult it is to get a voluntary organisation to execute such a massive project. typo3.org or the relaunch project perfectly shows the dillema's we are facing considering our growth. Huge tasks like this should be centrally coordinated and cannot grow organically like was so common when the TYPO3 project started.
   It also showed that the sprint concept, originally started with the User eXperience Week in 2009, is the way to go to progress on any level in our community. There of course is the occasional nameless coder that pulls a sprint of all alone.
   The first relaunch sprint was held in April 2011 in Essen in the Linux Hotel, a second one was held in Wiesbaden and the third and final relaunch sprint was done two weeks back in Wiesbaden.
   We are not finished though as many of you are aware of. The only way the relaunch could be done is to get rid of major blockers leaving some bugs unattended, unfortunately. To keep the project alive, typo3.org will live a continuous integrated life. The maintenance team has initiated a number of Fields Of Responsibility (FOR's) and quite a few are taken atm. The concept is that we will have a team of responsible developers that will be backed up by a company. The company will take over as soon as a problem seems to stagnate. The concept needs to prove itself the coming time, but as said before. No chance to do maintenance like before.
   Thanks to everyone that participated in this project. It is the largest project we ever executed in the community and there must have been around 50 people involved from start to finish.

2. TYPO3 version 4.7 and beyond
   We have seen quite some uproar concerning the naming and versioning scheme, which has settled down by now. This makes us aware of how difficult it is to deal with democracy or what actually the definition of democracy is at all. When the versioning announcement was made the developers from the core dev team, the marketing and steering commitee were very sure they discussed, approached and discussed this again in a satisfactory way in order to gain acceptance across the community. It still came as a surprise to many and that makes us think how to deal with such issues. The decision was also communicated outside of an 'official' channel. On the one hand we see an attempt to try and regain control of that channels. With the new typo3.org and an editorial team we have now the situation will surely improve, but there is no stopping social media, blogs etc. There is no other way then accepting free flow of information and dealing with it in an appropriate way.

3. FLOW3 version 1.1
   The FLOW3 conference, F3X, took place recently in Rosenheim not to far from here. I was there and very happy to see so many familiar faces. In fact only three people in the crowd had never heard of TYPO3. There were 170 attendees. The level of the presentations was very high and as a community manager not everything made sense to me, technical wise that is. In general, however, it is overwhelming to see the interest in FLOW3. This was a German language conference. The organisation told me that is a lot of interest from abroad, so that really makes you wonder how big an international FLOW3 conference will be.
   Personally I have also embraced FLOW3, YES!
   Ideas for a TYPO3 planet have been around for a long time already. Christopher has already built one based on FLOW3 aggregating FLOW3 blogs. I must honestly admit that I was looking for a standard PHP solution, like used on php.net. I can do stuff on the command line you know, but I am no wizard. Seeing all activity around FLOW going on I decided to JUST DO IT with FLOW3 liked offered to me before. I mailed Christopher about it who provided me with ..... a backend login? To my surprise I could login to a wonderful bootstrapped backend. Awesome! Why didn't you tell me before Christopher you had this nice backend? I only did this last week his answer was. Atm we are waiting for a design provided by the design team and we will have our TYPO3 planet running on FLOW3.

MIND

[slide: MIND]

1. Teams
   One of the major tasks I see for myself is maintain and initiate new teams. The past two years we have seen quite some teams spring into life or teams continuing there existence. Workspaces team, design team, screen cast team, editorial team, phoenix team, usability team. Of course we already had the well known ones like the core dev team, the FLOW3 team. In for instance the Phoenix team the scrum methodology was adapted, including daily online standups. The other teams have their regular meetings as well allthough not on a daily basis.
   Essential teams like mentioned here almost never automagically create themselves. I do notice that when I invite people to join a team almost everyone is honored to join a team. Atm we have no official structure for what you need to be an official team. Maybe an official structure is not necessary at all. There is an allergy towards 'official' it seems. In general I would say that what separates TYPO3 teams for loose projects is that the teams have regular meetings, write protocols and have an issuetracker on Forge. In return the members get a typo3.org email addres of account.

2. Communication
   Team communication is something that is functioning already. Communication between the teams is something we are working on. There already is a concept for a Product Team (basically a general teams assembly), that consists of 'product managers' (TYPO3, FLOW3, Phoenix even typo3.org will be considered a product) and team leaders or representatives of the teams. Just as I am aware of the people needs for teams to interact within the community there is also the need for a more technical get-together, discussing ongoing stuff. We did not have such a team or team meeting before, probably expecting the Association and specifically the Steering Committee to take care of that. Increased democracy within the TYPO3 Association, where now most bodies are chosen from the members, has sent the direction of the Association more towards managing legal and budgetary matters.This is of course closely related to what goes on in the community as this is where funding is determined for future projects.
   Gina will be giving a presentation about the changes in the TYPO3 Association and what that means for the community and for you!
   We will discuss this Product Team initiative further at the Developer Days and make a first run of the concept soon.

3. Events
   We are here at the Developer Days 2012, the most important community event. Or is it? The last few years we have seen the arrival of many new events, mainly barcamps. All in all there are 4 to 5 now in Germany which boast an average attendance of around 100 people. We have an event on Mallorca now, a TYPO3 conference in Cambodia, a TYPO3 conference in Canada and there are already rumors of the Lunar TYPO3 Conference in 2030. There are three official events. The Snowboard Tour, the conference and the developer days, but the already fine line is getting thinner with all these events like earlier mentioned the FLOW3 conference. All this activity underlines the livelihood of TYPO3 around the world, but of course foremost in Germany.

SOUL

[slide: SOUL]

click: Inspiring People To Share

The Future

[slide: FUTURE]

click: The future is
click: up to you!

[slide: TYPO3]