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.
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