ben van 't ende

T3DD12 Keynote

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 11:32:00 +0000

T3DD12: Go Share An Adventure

presentation on slideshare: http://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]

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.
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.
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]

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.
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.
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]

F3X

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 16:49:00 +0000

The F3X conference was held in the small town of Kolbermoor south of Munich and organised by Techdivision. Sacha Storz, leader of the TYPO3 editorial team and employee of Techdivision, was mainly responsible for getting this event of the ground. The conference brought 170 attendants to the Kesselhaus in Kolbermoor. The location is an absolutely great renovated building from the industrial era. Mission briefing by Franz Kugelman It was quite amazing to me that the event brought in so many people. Only three people in the crowd were unknown with TYPO3. There were lots of familiar faces from our TYPO3 family around. In that sense a typical TYPO3 event with the warmth, friendliness and enthusiasm so well-known in the TYPO3 community. Karsten talks FLOW3 I was so brave as to attend almost all talks if only for some of the pics in this article. The presentations were of a pretty technical level, not always to be grasped by a community manager. Despite the technical content of the talks, I was really happy to talk to several known people, to get acquinted with some new guys and gain some better understanding of FLOW3. Robert also revealed that Amadeus is using FLOW3. This has been under a Non Disclosure Agreement for a long time. Amadeus is a leading transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry. Amadeus is a proud user of the FLOW3 framework. Unfortunately I could not stay for the Social Event, that is so characteristic for a TYPO3 event. I had to reach Wiesbaden in the evening to be fit and aware for the upcoming typo3.org relaunch on Monday, April 2. The future of FLOW3 as basis for our new CMS and as stand alone framework look very promising. I personally am looking forward to start a planet (blog aggregation) based on FLOW3 with a bootstrap backend as soon as our design team can deliver a layout for that. Thanks to Christopher Hlubek for setting that up. The FLOW3 conference itself will be in English next year and of course that will mean a much higher number of attendees. Sacha's pics on Google+: http://goo.gl/voFqo

KORN

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:53:00 +0000

It had been quite a while again since I last time visited Paradiso. I had some memorable concerts there, like Ice-T. Gijs has never been in the most well-known pop temple of the Netherlands. Paradiso is housed in a converted former church building that dates from the nineteenth century and that was used until 1965 as the meeting hall for a liberal Dutch religious group. The atmosphere was really good and the people friendly. I am not always sure if I fit in the audience being slightly older then the kids in some of the Korn video's. Luckily the audience was very mixed agewise and I did not feel out of order. Korn started out with some older songs i did not really know, but the audience did. After half an hour stuff from "The Path of Totality" was performed. I really like those new songs with the dub stop influence. My favourite: "Get Up ". I was really amazed they covered "We Do Not Need No Education". No problem to sing along that one. Gijs and me both felt very energised after the concert. It was LOUD and good and I was happy to have had my ear plugs with me.

Goodbye steering committee!

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:10:00 +0000

In 2004 a structure for raising funds for the further development of TYPO3 was setup by active members of the TYPO3 community, which resulted in a board and a steering committee, in full called the TYPO3 Association. This structure has become obsolete with the steady growth of the Association. February 3rd and 4th saw the last Combined Steering Committee Board meeting (CoSCoB) followed by the General Assembly of the TYPO3 Association. The meeting was held in Basel and featured the initiation of the newly elected Expert Advisory Board (EAB) and the re-election of the Business Control Committee (BCC). Three members of the board exchanged their position with new faces. All in all a total refresher of the TYPO3 Association. The board: Peter Pröll, Stefan Busemann, Adrian Zimmermann, Juergen Egeling, Gina Steiner, Mario Rimann, Søren Schaffstein
I joined the steering committee (sc) in 2008 and held the position of chairman until March of last year, not replaced by anyone. As community manager I wanted to focus exclusively on the community. Being chairman of the sc meant getting an agenda together for every meeting and reminding the members to get their issues into the agenda and following up on issues discussed in the meetings. You could regard the sc as a cross section of community members and leaders of companies or projects within the community. The sc never went public with the stuff they discussed as the teams do now with their protocols. Most of the time the sc discussed ongoing business. Any 'decisions' made in the sc were presented as guidelines to project leaders or to me, the community manager. When I joined the sc it was still unsure what the position of the sc in the whole TYPO3 eco-system would be. It seems that the clearer it got the more there was the need for another structure like effectuated at this years General Assembly. The most recent line-up of the sc was: Kian Gould (owner of AOEmedia), Christian Julle Jensen (CEO of Moc systems, co-initiator of the TYPO3 Association), Eike Diestelkamp (CEO of HDnet), Robert Lemke and Karsten Damblekans (Lead programmers for FLOW3 and Phoenix, co-initiators of the TYPO3 Association), Ingmar Schlecht (budget responsible for V4), Michael Stucki (Leader of the INfrastructure team and long-time contributir), Daniel Hinderink (CEO of Dpool, co-initiator of the TYPO3 Association) and myself. The past few years the steering committee dealt with matters ranging from communicating TYPO3 to the structure of the Association. The last meeting might have been most significant of all. With the TYPO3 Association structural changes comes the need for a more organised structure of the community. Organisation not as in regulation, but in the sense of providing a basis for communication and growth of the teams. As community manager I have already seen that setting up regular meetings and communication sets up a solid basis for teams. Like the half yearly release cycle we intiated a few years ago, the regular meetings provides trust and confidence throughout the community. In the sc we discussed an organizational form that provides a platform for the 'official' teams. Through the years there was a now and then active RnD committee (Research and Development) consisting of leaders of the V4 and V5 branch. The commitee was not blessed with a mission, but started to recognize it's significance in the past year. The sc discussed a renaming of the RnD committee, it's function and composition. It will not be a committee anymore, but more likely a board consisting of, by the teams appointed representatives to this new body. Along side of this community board there will be a community counsil, where community issues can be escalated. The composition of it's members is not known yet. A community counsil is quite a common thing in communities, although I must say that the TYPO3 community seems to be very balanced and friendly with little need to escalate issues. There are a lot of Open Source communities around that have major problems to deal with. Partially that also has to do with the size of these communities. The TYPO3 community is a mid-sized community largely concentrated in Germany. That makes it a lot easier to deal with then communities that have large local communities. As the steering committee is dissolved as per now, the founding of these new bodies will take place in the RnD committee. It is an ongoing process and your input is appreciated. I would like to thank all members of the steering committee for their dedication and participation in the meetings we had over the years. I am excited about the changes we contributed to and I hope these changes will spark of the same amount of enthusiasm as there was criticism back then about the lack of democracy and transparency.

Day 5: Thank God It Is Friday

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:52:00 +0000

Today I spent most of my day gathering opinions and writing some conclusions about a thread going on in the core internal list about branding and strategy related to TYPO3, FLOW3 and the next-generation CMS that is being developed. One of the things that struck me most was how the TYPO3 Association is viewed from the outside and the inside. Not much is known about how the TYPO3 Association functions and how the budgets are determined or granted. There is a "Boarding Please" blog, but nothing much happened there lately. I guess the members are modest in a way and do what they have to do without asking for any credits. I am sure we need to get some communication going there and I am looking at ways to make that work. We face exiting times ahead of us with the new products. Exciting in the sense of impact in the opensource world and CMS world in particular and for us internally as a challenge to manage that change as a community and keep true to our motto "Inspiring People to Share". Thanks everyone for following me this week. I hope you got a bit of an insight. It gave me a good overview of what I do as well. I will continu blogging about my work as a community manager, not in the regular interval as I did this week of course. If you have any remarks or suggestions then please add them here. You can also reach me by mail. Have a great and relaxing weekend Ben

Day 4: Supermassive Black Hole

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:59:00 +0000

It was one of those days, where you get nothing done. You probably all know what that feels like. When you are employed it sucks for your boss, but that is something that can happen. When you are self-employed, you just can't write hours. Not all was lost today however. I have communicated with the marketing team once again that we need to step up our marketing activities. I have received a number of mails the past weeks asking how we can promote TYPO3 better in the face of our biggest competitor Drupal. Drupal is gaining more ground as I type this. Of course Drupal is backed by Acquia that is able to spend loads of money on marketing and education. The fact that we have a CMS that excells in a number of area's does not market itself. I am sure we have a lot of potential in our userbase to get proper marketing going, but I need to find those people. We have an awesome design team that we can connect to our marketing efforts. The new brand- and yearbook from TYPO3 by Rasmus Skjoldan, that will be released end of this year, will also be important for marketing. So marketing is in focus!

Day 3: ECLS and sushi

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 10:40:00 +0000

Meditation is quite relaxing and something I should do more often I guess. It provides a stable basis for the beginning of the day. As I already mentioned yesterday, wednesday, will not be a full TYPO3 day I need to do some administration in the morning hours I have at my disposal. Bills to pay and invoices/declarations to write. So sitting in the train, speeding through the dense fog, to Amsterdam I write my morning summary. What is easy to summarize is that things hardly ever go as you expect. I answered a lot of mails, had my coffee break and tried to get something together to host an etherpad solution. We still have a Debian VPS hanging around we initially intended for our Big Blue Button conference server. There is an ubuntu package for etherpad so that should not be to difficult. The morning is over before you can say "TYPO3 rocks". I spent some time on the train answering mail and reviewing a document a friend of mine wrote concerning opensource Software.

The Hub is the venue in Amsterdam where we will organise the European Community Leadership Summit. Greg Zysk and me went to check it out in the afternoon. Greg is a management consultant, living in Amsterdam, mainly involved in opensource projects with a focus on starting sustainable businesses through the use of opensource software as a platform. The Hub itself is suitable for hosting like 100 people and located in the center of Amsterdam, which is perfect. The organisation itself is very open-minded in dealing with the facilities surrounding the event like catering etc. Their whole attitude is very cooperative. They also show a personal interest in the event. The Hub features a central space and a number of smaller spaces. The central space offers the possibility to host a number of groups. Sustainability is a central theme for The Hub. Last year I planned to take a course in sustainable leadership at The Hub that unfortunately got cancelled. Maybe another opportunity will arise to do a similar kind of course at The Hub once. Sustainability is something I think is going to be a central issue for communities in the coming time. So now we know where we are going to host the summit we need to start organising the rest surrounding it. One of the most important parts will be a general description we need for sponsors. ECLS will be unconference style. Entrance is free and we will be looking for sponsors to cover the full event. CLS Portland for instance was sponsored by the likes of Google, Microsoft etc.

In the evening we met up with Marc Vloemans, also living in Amsterdam, for sushi. Marc is well-known in Dutch opensource country, working as an opensource consultant for, among others, governmental organisations and is chairman of the Dutch Opensource Suppliers Organisation (OSSLO). A lot of ideas where exchanged concerning the opensource eco-system and specifically about professionalising communities. Many OS software communities are developer-focused and aspects like community management and marketing tend to be underrated. Both of them are necessary to keep communities thriving, especially in this time where adoption of opensource seems to be declining. So we are half way through "A Week With The Community Manager". I hope this gives a bit of an insight in what I generally do. I realise some of the stuff might not be that interesting, but for once I wanted to sketch what a week usually is for me. I must say it also is a good excercsie for me personally as it increases my awareness of my daily business.

Day 2: Mainly Community Reporting

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:51:00 +0000

I have a mailbox with an excellent SPAM filter, but that does not seem to it's job like it should, but then again how do you stop 'real' people mail? OK so a lot of different mails to answer. These days there is a lot of traffic on the Steering Committee list and also on the Core Internal list. We discuss some strategy and especially branding and marketing is a very important topic. Open Source just does not sell itself anymore and positioning ourselves properly is more important then ever. Rasmus Skjoldan is leading our branding effort and will publish the TYPO3 brandbook and the accompanying yearbook before the end of the year. I will try to arrange a meeting with the design team and Rasmus to see how we can give him some support here. One of the things I do on a regular basis is to connect dots between people, initiatives and teams. In some of this morning's mailexchange with the screencast team we released our collaborative service ietherpad.com is already down for days and we need an alternative. We still have pads there that are quite important to us. There seem to be a lot of services these days based on etherpad and it does not seem that difficult to set up your own server. Would be cool to have a etherpad.typo3.org, right? In the background I get alerts from my release team Skype bookmark. The guys, Ernesto (4.5), Xavier (4.6) and Oliver, are pretty busy preparing the release of new minor releases of all versions slated for around 15:00 this afternoon. Always great to see how much care is put into the releases. So much for quickly dealing with my mailbox! Now a quick visit to the espresso machine and finally cut of all communication to start writing the Community Report for October.

So I started writing the Community Report for October. First I check my own timelog for the last month and the news articles of last month to get a clear overview of the community activities for last month. It was quite a dynamic month with the conference, the launch of a stable FLOW3 and the release of TYPO3 version 4.6. Finally things surrounding our new next-generation CMS are taking shape. The road to our new CMS is a long one, but based on the newest technology. The current developers have chosen to first develop FLOW3 as a PHP framework before continuing with the CMS part. I see FLOW3 in the news all around me. Something is happening there. Writing the monthly report is great, because it reminds you of the bigger picture and also stuff that might have gone unnoticed. Writing about the screen cast team made me think of the very charming danish-english or german-english screen casts we had or actually still have. The team has a native speaker from the UK now. My favorite would be that we have a voice-over like on the discovery series "Deadliest Catch", where the voice is done by a scotsman. Imagine that ;-)

So the day is done and the Community Report for October 2011 is published. At the same time as I published my report maintenance releases of TYPO3 were announced and a first patch release of FLOW3. We have been busy today. It still amazes me how long writing an article or getting the information and images together always takes. My timetracker tells me I have been working 4 hours on it. I am quite happy with how this report looks. Some nice images and good info. Did not take more then 5 minutes for the first feedback, which made me immediately correct some things, like attaching the PDF version of the Generic Flyer. Like always I intend to write the next Community Report early next month.

I am already looking forward to tomorrow. It will not be filled with TYPO3 work, but it will be filled with community work. I will be checking out a location in Amsterdam for the European Community Leadership Summit I am organising together with some other folks early 2012. In the evening I have an interesting little dinner planned with some Open Source guys from Amsterdam. More about this tomorrow.

Day 1: Meetings and ongoing community affairs

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 16:36:00 +0000

Anyway...I start most of my days walking with my two dogs after having taken Daan and Sam, our kidz, to school. I live close to the forest's edge and what better way to start the day then with a refreshing walk. I spend my days alone in my 'office' and I definitely need to get out once in a while. Concentration only last so far. I recently also started going to the gym to work out. I can recommend anyone in our line of business, or any line of business, to work out one way or the other. Daily exercise can improve mood, executive function, decision-making and creativity and decrease anxiety and fear.

After preparing my blogging activities I spent quite some time on an internal issue that affects the way we progress with our current TYPO3, our new PHP framework FLOW3 and our next-generation CMS that is currently being build on top of FLOW3. Developments there have been anxiously awaited for the last few years and concern everyone in the TYPO3 eco-system. Unfortunately I cannot go into details here, but what I try to achieve in such a situation is to get the basic information out of a complicated and long discussion and get things moving forward again. Not an easy task, but when things come together there is great reward so to speak.

14:00 is the regular time for our release team meeting. We have been doing this on an regular basis ever since regular releases where introduced. This week's meeting was attended by Oliver Hader (version 4 core development team leader), Xavier Perseguers (former release manager) and Steffen Ritter our current release manager. Oliver gave us a little update on the code sprint that was done this last weekend (actually November 17-20). Main topics of the code sprint where "Migration to ExtJS4", Logging, Indexed Search speed improvements, Accessibility / Improvements on the "Government Package" being produced for the sponsored BLE project and the File Abstraction Layer (FAL) & Image Gallery Extension based on the File Abstraction Layer. More info on the code sprint will be published tomorrow. Within the team we also dicussed some of the general issues ike mentioned in the previous paragraph. After the meeting Steffen and me discussed some mails he was going to send out to the subprojects (workspaces, Extbase and linkvalidator) and contributors of the current version. Some awareness needs to be raised developments for TYPO3 version 4.7 have started.

So the day kind of ends with the screen cast team meeting. Some good progress has been made with a first test run. Tom Warwick (UK) and Oliver Wand are in close contact for the first run and the team hopes to have something finalised next monday.

In between meetings a lot of current affairs have been going on which prevented me to work on the Community Report for October however. Let's see how far we get with that one tomorrow. Now it is off to the kitchen to make some nice pasta, visit my dad and finish the day in the gym with some kickbox fitness.

A week with the community manager

ben.vantende@typo3.org — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:30:00 +0000

As TYPO3 community manager I write articles and publish community reports about what is going on in the community as you can see on news.typo3.org. The contents of such a report is closely tied to my work, but it does not show what I actually do. Day 1 starts with writing only. I need to write the community report October 2011, the third Quarterly Report for the TYPO3 Association and I have taken on the blogging challenge. That basically means shutting down other communication, like mail and social networks in order to focus on these tasks. Shutting down other communication is hard, because I usually also need those channels to write my articles. This coming week the national committee concept (including evangelists), marketing, the typo3.org relaunch are on my agenda. I have quite some regular online meetings. Today with the release team and the screen cast team. Thursday with the design team and some meetings with Andriy Kushnarov about distributed team management and coaching in general and with Francois Suter about documentation and the community in general. At the end of everyday I will give a summary of what happened that day and explain a bit of what I am doing in general. Please feel free to react, to suggest or to comment. I will be a little more active on Twitter these days. You can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/benvantende