This post should sum up the proposal for community management in austria which Georg Ringer and me sent to the TYPO3 association.
Past/current status
I met Georg at different events like barcamps and T3DD (every of these events was not in austria) and we always came to the point, that we would like to have an event to meet regularly. At this point there already have been loose events organized by the TUGA (TYPO3 Usergroup Austria) which always found a quite huge crowd to attend. In 2012 we took action and started to organize monthly events. Every other month we organized a meetup in Linz and in Vienna. Now, about 2 years later, we have around 20 participants which are at these events every month - and I think it is really a great place to share knowledge, to ask questions, to kickstart new projects or only for a nice evening with people from the community.
At this point I would like to thank Markus Klein, Florian Weiss, Robert Wildling and all the sponsoring agencies for making this possible!
Vision
But we think this is only the beginning! Austria is one of the countries where TYPO3 has the biggest market share. There are many more developers/project managers/students/rookies all over the country which by now don’t have a strong community in their area. The events in Linz and Vienna would benefit from a more professional organization - which takes some time to find speakers, sponsors and a fitting location.
What we would like to achieve:
Make the planning and organization a payed for position
This is not limited to our work! The organization of events should be payed to achieve some professionalism. It is not easy to get sponsors on board, visit and decide for a good location and to reach out for speakers if you have to do it in the evenings and on the weekends.
Reach out to other cities/regions
We would like to meet up with as many TYPO3 enthusiasts in austria as possible. The plan would be to have TYPO3 meetups in at least every regional capital in austria. We would like to reach out to local users and maybe get them to organize their very own meetups.
Gain visibility
There already is a website (tuga.at) which is not quite ready for the year 2014. We would like to update this site and use it to post some pictures, event-details and slides from the meetups. There should be one central place to get all the information you would like to know. We would also like to have some “marketing materials”. These could be flags for the tables at the meetups, social accounts like meetup.com or other stuff which helps the people to organize events. And we would like to have localized marketing material for TYPO3 which we could offer the people to sell this product to their customers. Another point would be some kind of evangelism. Community members should reach out to other communities (like for example PHP usergroups) and talk about the TYPO3 products.
Conclusion
After reading this article we thought it would be a good timing to write down our vision and to send it to the TYPO3 association. I think our proposal is not competing with the community management we have right now (done by Ben), I think it is just an enhancement which would maybe get more people on board!
