It has been a looong time ....

By: Peter Pröll

T3CON09 wrap-up, discussion list for T3A members, Branding Guidelines, Event Calendar, Twitter, Micky, oDesk, Boskoop apples and more ...

Feuerschiff in Hamburg

Dear all!

It has been a long time since my last post. And today is my first day off since T3SAIL09. I am on a Hamburg visit and just had a great meal in the Feuerschiff. Now I like to use the time, to let you know about the most important things that have happened in the last 3!! months.

First of all, I will try to keep up with monthly posts in future, most likely after the board meetings (that's when I have the latest news anyway).

T3CON09

The conference has been a great event. More visitors then ever before. More tracks and sessions and last but not least the best revenue we ever had, about 95.000 EURs! This all was possible after about 500 working hours from punkt.de and dkd (the organizators of the conference). 500 working hours free of charge! Thanks a lot girls and guys. And not to forget: all the generous sponsors of the event! Thanks a lot!!

There has been a Q&A session on T3CON09, too. It only lasted about one hour. That is by far not enough time to answer all questions and discussing things. So there has been the input that a newsgroup is wanted to keep the discussion alive. Actually what I have not thought of during this session: we already have a mailing-list (the member mailing-list). We (the board) would like to ask you, to use this for discussions. If you configure a filter in your mail client that moves all mails from the list in one folder and if you configure the folder to show the contents in thread view, you have the full newsgroup functionality. As this is a members only mailing-list you can contact us also via info(at)typo3.org.

By the way: the date for T3CON10 is set. It will take place in Frankfurt (same place) on Sept. 30th through Oct. 2nd 2010.

Board News

The Branding Guidelines are in preparation. The first draft is about to be ready. Thanks to Patrick Lobacher for hours of research and work on this. The Branding Guidelines will give everybody a field manual on if and how you may use the TYPO3, FLOW3 and other trademarks owned by the T3A. This is needed as the trademarks have to be protected. The challenge is to find a way to protect the trademarks AND also allow an easy use of the trademarks to spread the message all over the planet, both at the same time.

There will be an Event Calendar pretty soon on the T3-websites. This will be open for everybody to enter TYPO3 related events. Right now it is in a closed testing phase and as soon as everything is fine it will go online.

Søren managed to get hold of the @typo3 twitter account. So this is already in use. If you are a twitter user just follow @typo3 to get hold of the latest news even faster.

For some weeks now the board is happy to have Micky. Micky is the board assistant and a part time worker. The workload is just getting too much to handle it only on honorary base. She is dealing with all the accounting and booking stuff related with membership payments. She is also helping out to get on top of all incoming communications (info(at)typo3.org and soon also fax and phone).

The freelancer procurement portal oDesk (http://www.odesk.com) now has a TYPO3 group. All service providers and freelancers who are "certified TYPO3 integrators" may join this group.

CoS-CoB

CoS-CoB that is a "combined steering committee and board meeting" - don't blame me, this was Gina's idea to name it like this ;-). Actually Jürgen and I always have problems with this naming, so we like to call it "Boskoop" like the cultivar of apples well known at least here in Germany. Boskoops take place four times a year to discuss and plan the more strategic issues. There is already an article from Søren about the last one. In short: the main topic right now is a restructuring of the T3A to enable more democracy. More news and details will follow...

Fair winds

This is it for now. Your feedback and comments here are very welcome and of course you can get in touch with me at info(at)tpyo3.org or via the members mailing-list.

If you like to help in all the various issues that have to be handled, you are very, very, very welcome!

All the best from the Feuerschiff in Hamburg (I'll have my desert now ;-))

Peter