[TYPO3-about] community continuous and interactive communication

[Ben van 't Ende]

Heyla Community,

https://plus.google.com/116640019850178099390/posts/1CUAM5CoN3W

In a post I recently did on G+ (link above) I raised the question on what you would want to hear from the community or from me as community manager. I really like G+ for several reasons. It has several advantages to FB and Twitter. There are several things that are impossible with these social media. What I want to achieve is to have a better interaction with the community and both from me to the community, vice versa and also interactivity for the community itself. G+ seems to hold all possibilities with the community feature. We have some 850 community members on G+. The fact that it is Google and not on our infrastructure speaks against using it in the opinion of quite some people,  summarising this.

I am enthusiastic nonetheless about the feedback I got. It is great to get feedback and when feedback is positive it is even better and can even make ones day ;) Even if you are not on Google you can still read the whole thread, so please have a go at it. The people that gave feedback on G+ mentioned wanting to be informed about teams, what community members are thinking about and having aggregation of several TYPO3 resources. Rasmus mentioned 'more frequent and more loose updates - yet in a bit longer texts than on Twitter', which I feel resonates with the TYPO3 community. I feel we can provide more transparency if we are able to communicate more in this way. Long articles are not the way to go any more and it seems people also do not have the patience to read through those. 

As I said in the G+ post we discussed interactivity of typo3.org extensively at the last typo3.org code sprint we had at the dkd offices in Frankfurt. Two interactive features like a contact point on each page (team leader, community manager, board member, general info address) and a feedback form are not far from being finished, so to speak. 

That still leaves the question how we should provide this interactivity for our community, if at all. As typo3.org is our information hub it seems the only option to do it there. You are currently reading this on forum.typo3.org that is a connection to our mailing-lists. It is great this connection is there as it makes our mailing-lists visible to the outside world and searchable. Even-though these forums provide good functionality they do not provide the interactivity we are so familiar with these days. The current commenting on typo3.org is as basic as it gets without notification etc. 

There will be a first trial integrating Disqus on docs.typo3.org if I understood that correctly. The disadvantage of Disqus is that it is not on our infra-structure. There is tool we discussed at the typo3.org code sprint called Discourse (discourse.org) which claims to be a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform both from a technology standpoint and a sociology standpoint. That sounds perfect. Ubuntu is doing a test run with it and the adoption rate seems high. Even though we can host that on our own infra-structure and it is Open Source, it's beta nature might be a disadvantage and that might also go for the fact that it is not PHP. Another alternative is creating it ourselves, but that has the disadvantage that that will take some time. 

Please think about it for a moment and give feedback to these communication topics.  

* Do you think there needs to be more interactivity or is it ok like it is currently?
* Do you have an opinion on what tools would be appropriate?
* What kind of information would you like to get from the community?
* What would you like to hear from a community manager perspective or from other perspectives?
* Is this a good place to communicate about the TYPO3 community, if not what would be most ideal?

Your feedback is appreciated. Also keep in mind that the TYPO3 community needs you!

Thanks Ben


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TYPO3 community manager