[Typo3-typo3org] The next steps

[Robert Lemke]

Hi folks,

thank you all for your contributions to the discussion about our hosting
situation.

A while ago I have taken the responsibility for the TYPO3 sites to represent
the interests of the TYPO3 Association and therefore the community. I have
made up a concept for the future TYPO3 sites, and some parts of it are
visible as seen in the TER document, others are part of my inner picture
which draw the trail to reach our common goal: A useful, informative and
reliable site for the TYPO3 project.

Because I have taken that responsability, I need the liberty to take
decisions to follow that path. I will listen to what people say and get
involved into discussions, and in the end I have to decide because we'll
seldomly find a solution which pleases everybody.

In this case I have finally decided to take the opportunity and accept the
offer of punkt.de. I think, after having discussed everything in detail,
that this solution meets best the current needs we have for TYPO3.org.

I won't go in details about reasons for the decision, at least not in this
thread. This is not ignorance, I just think that it is much more important
now to plan the next steps. We have a lot of work ahead which doesn't have
anything to do with hosting. We need people to take responsibility for
several tasks, some of them these are contained in this list:

   - TER: Let's discuss the remaining details of the concept and update
     the document. We should work on this as much as possible so we soon
     have a guideline for implementing the new TER. Some sub-tasks:

       - For refactoring the current TER we need a testing / development
         platform. Who creates and maintains such a platform?

       - For refactoring the current TER we also need unit tests. Who can
         compile all the neccessary information so we can quickly integrate
         unit tests in the current extrep_mgm extension?
 
       - Who extracts the suggestions and decisions from the discussions
         and prepares a summary which we can include into the general
         concept?

   - documentation.typo3.org: We need a fresh concept for separating the
     documentation section from the extension repository. That concept
     should allow for features like automatic generation of multiple output
     formats (online, single HTML, multiple HTML, SXW, PDF, ...), being 
     mirrorable, failsafe connection to other parts of TYPO3.org etc.

  - teams.typo3.org: We need a concept and development guidelines for
    the collaboration part of TYPO3.org. There are many ideas how we
    can improve communication and collaboration for the community,
    these include workspaces, team-wikis (timtaw), team-news and more.

  - news.typo3.org: 10% work is left for deploying the centralized news
    repository. Who would like to administer and take responsibility for the
    news site in the long run? Who organizes recruitment of editors and 
    assures quality of the articles? Team up with DocTeam?

  - users.typo3.org: In the long run we need a centralized management of
    frontend users for the TYPO3 sites. René already created a technical 
    solution using SOAP, but it has to be refined, documented and tested.

As you can imagine, there is much more to do. An essential requirement for
the success of these projects is having project leaders who take care of
their area in the long run. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case
in the DocTeam so it seems like much time and work is wasted with finding a
project leader, redesigning the wiki frontpage and finding a new project
leader again - let's learn from that.

For the TYPO3 sites we are currently four people who are officially in
charge:
 
  - Robert Lemke, T3 sites team leader, webmaster at typo3.org
  - Christian Jul Jensen, T3 sites team leader substitute,
webmaster at typo3.org
  - Karsten Dambekalns, webmaster at typo3.org
  - Michael Stucki, mailing list admin

Let's team up, structurize and organize our working power and let's join
forces for the spring cleaning 2005!

-- 
robert