[Typo3-dev] The Right Crew

[Kasper Skårhøj]

Hi Guys,

Thoughts kept buzzing around in my head this night and finally forced me to 
get out of bed early :-(

CONCERN:
A true concern I have is this; How do we channel all the great resources from 
the TYPO3 community into a unified effort on the development of TYPO3 which 
does not compromise the quality or impose great levels of overhead.

I need your help on the answer, but to prime the ground I will tell you about 
how I see myself and evaluate my personal skills as crucial for the success 
until now. This is NOT to be seen as a defense speech for what I have done! I 
don't need to defend any of it and I'm pretty proud of TYPO3 including its 
quirks. 

BACKGROUND:
As the initiator and chief developer of TYPO3 I think I possess at least three 
key criteria that were necessary for this role:

1: Vision
2: Pragmatism
3: Stamina

Vision: I have been visionary about concepts that solve realworld CMS problems 
(TCA / TER / TemplaVoila / TypoScript / ImageProcessing / Workspaces etc). I 
have also been visionary about the architecture of procedural programming in 
a language like PHP although unorthodox at times and not classic OOP at all.

Pragmatism: I have been willing to compromise when the degree of importance 
fell below a certain limit in order to actually release working code. I never 
believed that my code could not be improved, but I did believe that if I kept 
circling around in constant obsession with architecture I would not serve the 
overall vision.

Stamina: I kept going and going and going. I realized that to be successful I 
would have to concentrate on TYPO3 at the expense of business opportunities, 
education, other interesting areas of the web and the distraction that awaits 
around every other corner in life. Many times the grass has looked greener on 
the other side, but without my discipline of commitment TYPO3 would not be 
what it is today.

Now, what happens if I lacked one of these:
- Without vision there would be no product of interest.
- Without pragmatism the vision would be in alpha-state for eternity.
- Without stamina we had raised a tombstone back in 2002


THE RIGHT CREW:
Does every member of our future TYPO3 crew need all of these skills?

Vision: Not everyone needs to be visionary, in fact only a few might be 
preferable. I don't think visions are our problem. Maybe it could be a 
problem to agree on which visions to follow. Yet, a more serious problem is 
how the visions of functionality and code architecture can be adopted by 
those who are going to implement it (if we assume they are not necessarily 
the same as the visionaries)?

Pragmatism: One a continuum from visionary-coder-releasemanager the visionary 
could do with almost not pragmatism, the coders would have to live with a 
mixture and release managers must be very pragmatic. The interesting focus is 
the coders in the middle, because their responsibility is to make sure things 
are working today and tomorrow but in the long term pay attention to the 
visionaries direction. How can this be implemented in a way that doesn't 
break backwards compatibility between each release and at the same time is 
inspiring to coders?

Stamina: This one is - unfortunately - necessary for every link in the chain. 
To build anything as teamwork it is critical that every team member can be 
trusted to carry his part to the end. The unfortunate thing is that most 
people involved in volunteer work think that they can feel less committed to 
the cause because they are not paid and usually prioritize their paid work 
and opporties higher assuming that everybody will understand. Maybe others 
will understand but it just doesn't solve be huge problem it creates: When 
people are constantly running in and out of volunteer commitments it 
generates huge amounts of wasted overhead in the form of training, social 
investment etc. in the team! The impact on the volunteer context is even 
worse than for a company because a company could pay someone to deal with 
such overhead while in the volunteer context it is OTHER volunteers who waste 
their time on training a new volunteer that just disappears a few days, weeks 
or months after.
To make matters even worse for our online community it has been the general 
experience that people slip out even easier because they don't risk to face 
their abandoned team bodies in the local supermarket.



How, people. I'm sure you all have great intensions and plans for version 5 of 
TYPO3 and I'm all excited about discussing them. But how on Earth can we make 
sure that such a discussion is not just another play with verbal buzz-muscles 
that wastes time that could have been fruitfully used on practical coding? 

How can we make sure there is a crew to make it happen at all?



-- 
- kasper

-----------------
Think future, not feature