Go west, young man!

By: Olivier Dobberkau

Ingo Renner and I are currently in San Francisco in the offices of Infield Design. They are one of agencies using TYPO3 in the USA. Currently we are preparing a first meetup for people interessted in TYPO3. It will take place tomorrow at Hacker Dojo and details can be found here if you are around and want to join.

Many current factors in the US remind me of the time when TYPO3 started to hit the streets in Europe some years ago. The world was recovering from an economic crisis and the internet was not to be replaced by any other mean of communication.

In our talks with Marc from Infield Design we have found that many companies do not use TYPO3 here, because they do not know it and that other CMS (proprietary or open source) are more visible as a first solution for their needs.

One thing that came to my mind was the first snowboard tour that i participated in 2003. There i met a lot of people that i know only from a mailinglist. We stayed a week on the slopes and spent the evenings discussing about TYPO3. In that time Kasper and Robert released some fundamental stuff too like the Modern Template Building tutorial and an early version of TYPO3 Version 3.5 introducing the Extension API still in use today.

It was in that mixture that the idea of the TYPO3 user groups were born. Once back from Switzerland I initialised a first usergroup at our office at d.k.d. Some people showed up and the regularity of the events lead to an exchange of experience for the participants.

In the US grassroots movements help to grow an idea, a message and an agenda. Therefore i was quite surprised to see that noone was thinking of calling for an user group for TYPO3.

While visiting the Bay Area last year we talked and finally aranged a meetup space with the Help of Google Open Source Programs Office (Thanks Leslie, Ellen and Ingo for that!).

We hope that this will be some kind help for the US TYPO3 community to start the self igniting fireworks that we have seen after creating a Community that can meet also face to face.

There will be some Events where you will be able to met some people and learn about this great CMS called TYPO3.

• OSCON
• TYPO3 Conference Dallas 2010
• and other

I will keep you informed about those here.

I am looking forward to share my knowledge tomorrow in Mountain View. Come by. It is free and fun.

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