In 2012 I have given numerous talks and keynotes about Flow, Neos and the TYPO3 project. At a total of 11 conferences I gave my best to spread the word and give insights into our projects - and it looks like I succeeded, as I received more invitations to new conferences and met people again in our mailing lists and IRC channels who came in touch with TYPO3 the first time during my talks.
I do enjoy giving talks and attending conferences, but it is a lot of work, too. The preparation of papers, travel time and expenses are a position I am unlikely to cover from my own account. If I planned to attend the major events I've been at last year and joined four Neos and Flow codesprints, I'd have to spend almost 50 days of unpaid leave days. Fortunately, in 2012, I could cover a big part of this working time through the Neos / Flow budget from the TYPO3 Association.
This year, the budget for evangelism for TYPO3, Neos and Flow is: zero Euros. My application for funding was rejected due to the results of the member voting which went in the lines of: "going to conferences is fun, nobody should require a budget for that".
I don't share that opinion and would like to reply with a quote.
Frank Gerards wrote in the budget discussion forum:
I guess 5500€ for preparing talks and travel costs on NON-TYPO3-CONFERENCES to spread the word about TYPO3 Neos and TYPO3 Flow really is nothing to discuss about.
As I followed Roberts slideshows and his keynote on the DevDays 2012 he is an authentic person dedicated to what he is doing and I think he is the best evenagelist you can get for FLOW3. The core value of TYPO3 still is the quality of the developers' work on the code, so getting new, good devs interested to the TYPO3 universe is one of the most important tasks for the future. To envy that and not letting him have his preparing costs being paid from the Assoc budget is like one of the short-mindest discussions I saw on this platform.
To put it straight: Without the full-time dedication of a few people with the skills of Robert, you guys wont even discuss about a budget of nearly 1 Mio € in general !!! There would be no TYPO3 community about that size and no agency/freelance industry working with the tools they coded.
I sincerly hope, that Robert wont turn TYPO3/FLOW3 down in his priority list as after building about 3 projects with FLOW3/TYPO3 Flow and about 40 extbase/fluid extensions as freelancer and with a dev-team (additionally working with Cake PHP, Yii and other PHP frameworks), FLOW3 is simply the best and productive enterprise framework there is on the market today.
So I would encourage all discussion members to look at the bigger picture and stop being small-minded.
I have participated in a row of call for papers for 2013 and also have been invited to a few conferences already. For the upcoming FOSDEM in Brussels I have been fortunate enough to find a sponsor covering the travel expenses and accommodation: Beech IT's Edward Lenssen hardly let me end my sentence before he replied with "consider it covered".
As it turns out, it's now up to the community only to promote TYPO3, Flow and Neos at conferences. It's a pretty big task, considering that bigger projects and companies send their full-employed evangelists to every other conference they can. But then again, it allows companies and individuals to channel their support more directly to efforts they find worth supporting.
Oliver Wand | 18.01.2013
"As it turns out, it's now up to the community only to promote TYPO3, Flow and Neos at conferences."
Hasn't this always been up to the community?
Carsten Bleicker | 18.01.2013
I say it again and again and again.
The Community gives no budget.
This means they don't want it.
This means leave the community.
I will be a part of a new one.
foertel | 18.01.2013
"As it turns out, it's now up to the community only to promote TYPO3, Flow and Neos at conferences."
So you still consider it better, this being the job of one man?
"going to conferences is fun, nobody should require a budget for that"
Think you got this wrong. It's more like "we all have to pay for attending conferences". I submitted talks to all the events I've attended since 2009 and spent aprox. 1/3 of my time from various typo3barcamp attendences in extbase sessions and discussions ... so what?! It's just part of the deal ...
Irene Höppner | 18.01.2013
@foertel:
So you compare having a session at a barcamp with a keynote at a TYPO3 conference or a talk at a conference outside the TYPO3 Community.
And you compare the travel costs of a Bahncard100 holder for events that are mostly in Germany with the travel costs for events all around the world.
IMHO those comparisons are very bad ones.
Dominique Feyer | 18.01.2013
I'm sad when I read a post like that. The decision of the community to spend zero euro in communication outside of our community (main event, php conf, ...) is a stupid idea (sorry for my words).
@ttreeagency is ready to sponsor a talk during next year. Robert contact me, we can speak about this idea.
Wouter Wolters | 18.01.2013
@foertel Better one men spreading the word then nobody out there spreading the word at non TYPO3 events.
Just like Dominique I see it in a different way.
When TYPO3 CMS, Flow and Neos is more know to people from outside the community, the more work there is for agencies..
Andreas | 18.01.2013
Please don't confuse "members of the TYPO3 Association" with "the TYPO3 Community". The members of the TYPO3 Association voted for the different budgets - not the TYPO3 Community.
Bernhard Welzel | 19.01.2013
i belief that this year the budget vote simple went horrible wrong. the outcome most likely does NOT reflect how i belief the community want to spend the budget, but most certainly does not reflect the opinion of the majority of the community members.
anyhow, this does not give you a budget to continue your great work for TYPO3 / flow.
therefor i decided to sponsor you for at least one talk this year.
Georg Ringer | 19.01.2013
but isn't that exactly a way to go? I read about multiple people sponsoring your talks. this is a total win-win situation, isn't it?
Joey | 19.01.2013
Well - first of all I want you to know, we gave you a +1 for evangelism, but I think you should try to see it from a different point of view:
To put it straight: Without the full-time dedication of a few people with the skills of Robert, you guys wont even discuss about a budget of nearly 1 Mio € in general !!! There would be no TYPO3 community about that size and no agency/freelance industry working with the tools they coded.
I think this is true, and this might be the reason why the voters decided to not send people with these skills to conferences all over the world. It is much more important to have these skills availabl to finish the product you guys have been working on for years now.
So it's not that people don't want evangelism and spreading the word about TYPO3 at all, it's more like people would like to see other guys doing the job who are not into coding that much.
After all I see that ben got quite a large budget for community management, which will be spreading the word as well, but in a completely different way.
@Bernhard Welzel: Why do you believe that? When I take the average outcome of the discussions I had with people of the TYPO community about the different budget applications it's more or less exactly the result I have expected. But maybe you are talking with another part of the community than I usually do ... but hey - this is how democracy works - and if you want to change the results, maybe you should convince more people to become members with the right to vote.
Joey | 19.01.2013
Of course it should be Ben with a capital B and TYPO3 with a 3, just hit the submit button too early ;-)
Andrew | 19.01.2013
Sad and dumb ((
Robert, you're the best, keep on coding man! ))
Bernhard Welzel | 20.01.2013
@Joey: you are right - specially with the point that if i want to change the results i should convince more poeple to become members with the right to vote.
so i am at fault at this point.
however, if you look at a discussion like http://forge.typo3.org/boards/15/topics/22 the discussion is - at least to me - clearly not about the question if a budget for Evangelism would be money well spend for the product TYPO§ and flow, but more in the line of "i don´t want robert to get money for something he should do for free because i want him to work for free or he should get lost (...)".
i personally belief robert should not do anything at all. BUT if he wants to promote TYPO3 and flow at conferences, i am happy to pledge a budget for it to enable him to spend his time for the community.
and for how "democratic" the vote was - i can´t see how 204 votes can represent a community of 100.000 people. https://voting.typo3.org/election/budget-priority-poll-2013/showresults
Joey | 21.01.2013
@Bernhard: The money was collected by the TYPO3 association via member fees and donations, so it's up to the members of the association to decide how to spend it. The decisions have been made by an official board, that has been elected for this purpose, based on the results of a voting by the members of the association. So it has been as democratic as it could have been.
It's not the job of the association to represent the whole community but to enable parts of the community to do a better job, even if those parts are not members of the association. So even if the rest of the community who neither took the decisions nor got any money does not agree with these decisions, the only thing they could do about it, is to become a member and get the right to vote, which is what my company did.
Chris Zepernick | 21.01.2013
Hi Robert,
although I get why you wrote the blog article. Yet again it shows why, to my mind, a lot of people voted against the evangelism budget.
Evangelism to my mind has a lot to do with communication and how you treat people, as well as respect decisons made. Yet again you decided
to write and publish your article __BEFORE__ the EAB got the chance to publish their results and perhaps explain why your budget was declined.
This is a bad and very political way to communicate inside a community, and shows a big lack of respect for the voting and the decisions made.
But perhaps there will be a point where you start to reflect.
We had a lot of bad communication skills and other behaviour shown during the last years by the FLOW Team, especially you because you have been the most
visible face of that team.
To give some examples:
You and Kartsten started in 2006 with the Task to build the new CMS, paid by the Assoc, yet here we are 6 years after that, still no stable, feature rich CMS,
but an alpha with a lot less out of the Box features then the TYPO3 CMS (without TER Extensions).
5 Years after the Start we got at least a stable Framework, but that will have bracking changes, after one year, with the yet to deliver 2.0.
Both up to today, compared to their competitors (Symfony, Symfony CMF, Drupal, ezPublish) not really fast at all.
Is Flow nice to develop, yes it is, a lot nicer then the named. But given todays requirements for Web-Applications, nice to develop is at least at my side of
the border not priority no.1 .
In early 2012 we got the communication that Extbase will no longer be the bridge from the CMS 6.x branch to Neos, mostly because of the lack of communiction
between the Extbase and the Flow Team, and as far as I got the opinions on that topic the lack of support for the Extbase Teams from Flow.
In late 2012 we all got, for the most of us suprising, a new naming. With a presention, at best describe as a nice amateur presentation.
Neos Page broken, on second click. Flow page for days still saying Flow3. Page communicating the new naming not ready or revied at all,...
And last but not least during that time I had been talking to EAB and others in the Assoc, and they all told me "uni sono" that there was a workshop
for that naming stuff scheduled with a big group of people wanting to discuss that and postponed by you on short notice.
For me with a good reason, the guy that created the brand was not available, ok for me.
But honstly, it is without any respect for the community , the Assoc Teams, and the Assoc Members and an example for very bad communication
to postpone a workshop, and afterwards force something upon us, discussed in a very small circle involving very few people and even fewer
of the Teams within the community.
Sorry Robert,
we all had put a lot of faith in you and Karsten, you got a lot of trust beforehand from all of us, but with behaviour like that one loses trust and faith very easy
and very very fast.
To my mind this is what just happend to you and Karsten.
A lot of people I have been talking to lately have lost faith in Neos,
a lot of people like FLOW developing wise, but we all know, compared to symfony2 it is sloooooowwwww, to say the least.
Thankfully with composer support we will have access to a lot of external libs on the web, a big minus for version 1.x. But it is
till lacking a lot of features necessary in todays web world (Out of the Box Cloud support, CDN support, Varnish / Proxy Cache support,
using more than one storage engine at once for differnet entities,...).
But besides those examples, a few words on your and Karstens applications for budget.
I have looked at all those applications, and at least in my world they would have been declined too.
Why? Because they lack on curital part if one applies for budget, espacially in that amount.
Information !!
Evangelism for instance,... you applied for 5.500 € telling us you want to go 5 conferences, prepare papers etc.
No word which conferences you want to attend as speaker, what you want to talk about, what you like to achieve.
Try this as an employee of a company and see where it might take you. In my opinion a detailed plan would haven
silenced the critics quite soon.
Phoenix Development
Not a single word about what features to implement, which milestones to reach, what should be in wich release.
Something to hold you accountable for. So why should anyone contribute if the outcome is not known ?
Please try to get some venture capital this way, or any funding at kickstarter for instance.. I predict there ist no luck with that.
Phoenix Release Management
Nothin here either, no commitment, no strategy, no planed releases.
Tell me please why should anyone trust in you and your work with literally no information or commitment to any goals at all?
Why should anyone of us be willing to contribute Assoc money, time, efforts if you decide stuff in a small and often felt closed circle
of people rather then having an open discussion at least on the mailing lists ?
I my opinion all the occasions, misscommunication, and sometimes bad attitude towards parts of the community (on criticism, demand for results, etc.)
lead to the decissions made, and the voting results,.. finialy to the loss of funding from the assoc, or its drastic reduction.
In my opinion the only thing you and your fellow team members can do at the moment is to deliver reliablity, commitment, open transparent communication
and finaly release plans and schedules to be held accountable on, maybe that way you might regain the trust that lead to your and Karstens nomination
for FLOW / Neos Core Teamlead.
Robert Lemke
Chris,
thank you for taking the time to give your all-out feedback. I am a person who takes criticism to my person and my behavior serious – and sometimes a bit too serious. I won't be able to answer all your concerns or questions, so I rather take it as is - feedback to improve things in the future.
I agree that writing about the declined evangelism budget before the official announcement was impolite. However, the announcement to see was solely "Due to the low result in the poll were not able to consider this application". I urgently needed to find a sponsor for visiting FOSDEM, so I started asking around and eventually wrote the blog post.
I agree that communication has been a weak point in the Neos and Flow project. To be fair though, we received relatively few help with that and neither I, nor the team members are communication experts or native English speakers, so the whole communication consumes quite some time.
If communication was bad, for me personally the reasons boil down to too much workload, lack of knowledge about what will happen and, at times, frustration.
My friends can tell you that maybe 50 times more often than I showed publicly, I have been overly frustrated, angry or disappointed. I have tried my best to not let it slip out, but then again did it a few times. I am sorry for having hurt people by that, but more than once I had the intention to step back, leave the project and just needed a way to let off some steam.
I know really a lot of people who have a lot of trust into the team, the Neos and the Flow project. I am aware that there are others who don't have that trust. Thank you again for your feedback. I will try to improve communication to the degree I have the energy for doing so. But not beyond that.
Bernhard Welzel | 21.01.2013
@Joey: i most certainly agree.
as i am not deeply integrated into the "core" of the TYPO3 community, to me to whole problem seems to boil down to one point: communication.
(...and pointing fingers)...
as you can see from so many highly emotional posts many of the people involved into TYPO3 are very passionate about TYPO3.
i personally belief this emotional quality is a key factor to the success of TYPO3 - but currently a danger to the future of the TYPO3 family. as soon as there is a discussion like "assoc board vs. flow/neos core team" we as a community should stop to argue about budget questions and start to search for solutions.
if i might compare this to having a successful personal relationship: you never fix your problems by making a list of what when wrong last year and how much you hate a certain behavior, or that you will never forgive a certain action our partner did.
so my honest suggestion is: let us sponsor a marriage counselling session for the TYPO3 family - and resolve this situation befor it gets ugly for all of us.