[TYPO3-english] TYPO3 6.0 at the corner? How is it possible

[François Suter]

Hi Boris,

> IMHO the product board would be a good step ahead in the rigtht
> directions, but it's missing a mandatory component - the view from the
> other side.

There's the idea of having a community council, which was still 
mentioned in the early versions of the Product Board's draft. This was 
removed in later versions in order to proceed step by step and not rush 
everything at the same time. But Ben van t' Ende, our community manager, 
is actively working on the topic.

> This could / should lead to the situation that planned developments
> aren't build just because of developers choice (because it's hip or
> feels doing it would be nice to have).
> Once features / features requests are accepted, the product board AND by
> the expert group could make a targetting request to show if there really
> is a need for this certain feature.
>
> Additonally these features could get crowd funded, by publishing the
> accepted feature(s) to all T3A members and using a global plattform like
> kickstarter.
> This would lead to another option to show even people which are not
> directy connected to TYPO3 that there is a CMS with enterprise features,
> where they can participate even with money against features.

This is certainly an interesting idea, but it may not be so easy to 
achieve. In 2008 I was asked if I wanted to be the "Sponsoring Manager" 
for TYPO3. The idea was that developers could submit projects (rather 
large ones), with detailed descriptions, and companies could apply to 
sponsor these projects if they felt they suited their needs. As I'm no 
marketing guy but still versed in communication, my role was to help 
developers formulate their projects in a clear way and the hope was that 
funds would just roll in (I was not meant to do active fund-raising, 
which would have required a wholly different profile).

Two different things happened: out of three proposed projects, two 
gathered nothing or next to nothing. Apparently they had not enough 
business interest, which in a way is fine and certainly shows a process 
somewhat akin to what you describe above (if the feature is not 
interesting, it's not supported and thus not implemented).

The third one was the new FORM project. This one actually had most of 
its funding even before it was announced and the rest of the budget 
could be collected. The problem is that collecting money is not enough. 
Even though the project came from a developer (Patrick Broens) who - 
obviously - was perfectly willing to work on it, nobody else was. 
Patrick was left alone to do the project. Quite predictably this led to 
some (large) periods of latency where Patrick was busy with other stuff 
and quite a bit of demotivation too. The end result was that it took 
much longer to complete the project than expected.

What I mean with this is that gathering ideas and then gathering funds 
for implementing these ideas may not be enough for actually making them 
real, because you still need available manpower. Quite a lot of TYPO3 
developers work for companies, which won't agree to work at rather low 
rates (55€/h if you consider Association rates as a reference). 
Freelancers might be more inclined to do so, but experience shows that 
they are generally pretty busy.

I don't mean to say that what you suggest should not be attempted. It's 
definitely a good idea and the "sponsored projects" back in 2008 were a 
somewhat similar attempt at getting agencies more involved in funding, 
and definitely in a more direct way than just being T3A members.

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch