The twelfth Edition of the T3BOARD will be in Austria next year! For the second time we'll be on the Schmittenhöhe Hotel near Zell am See. This time we made sure that we'll be early in the season so that we'll have powder-runs instead of water-skiing ;-).

During this years Budget Meeting the Board and Steering Committee of the TYPO3 Association decided to raise the annual membership fees as of 2012-04-01. The membership fees changed as follows: Bronze membership from 100 ? to 105 ? per annum Silver membership from 700 ? to 770 ? per annum Gold membership from 2,000 ? to 2,100 ? per annum Platinum membership from 10.000 ? to 10,500 ? per annum In average all membership levels fees are raised about 6.85%. The registration fees will remain at their current levels. The decision to raise membership fees was taken to allow a greater portion of the submitted budget applications to be granted.

This article describes the use of funds granted to the TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3 project in 2011 and explains the budget application we handed in (and had granted) for 2012. Since 2011 I am the "budget responsible" for the TYPO3 Phoenix project. This means all invoices that are to be paid from the budget must be approved by me, before the TYPO3 Association pays them. There is one exception to the rule: my own invoices. Those are sent to Christian Jul Jensen for a check, a mechanism the Steering Committee set up to avoid self-approvals in cases like this. (At the time of writing this process is little bit off track, as the Steering Committe does not exist any longer after the recent General Assembly of the TYPO3 Association.) This post will show the budget applications for 2011 and 2012 as well as how the budget was spent. Before we dive into the details, let me explain some of the things you are about to see in the documents. The spreadsheets contain hours per month. Those are hours worked, so any holiday hours are not contained in those numbers. Furthermore, those numbers are minimum hours worked, as everyone on the team most of the time works more than is invoiced?Expenses mostly cover JiffyBox costs. Since we have a server team and a number of servers available for the TYPO3 project, you might see these as a waste of money. What you have to keep in mind, is that the use of project infrastructure was not always possible as easy and fast as it is now. When working on a project, sometimes it saves your butt if you are able to fire up a new machine or Apache instance within ten minutes instead of waiting a few days. That being said: we'll be working with the server team in the coming weeks to move those setups to the project's sponsored infrastructure.In 2011 there was a rule set for holidays in place. Those "working full time" for the TYPO3 Association (including not being allowed to take on other paid assignments) were given 20 days of holidays to use throughout the year. For 2012 that rule was dropped (because it was confusing and did not benefit everyone) in favor of a ten percent increase of the hourly rate.Last not least there is a graph titled Remaining Budget (Estimate) in the spreadhseets. It is a projection of the money spent, with the estimated costs being typeset in red. As invoices come in, those numbers are replaced by the real ones. 2011 For 2011 the project applied for 266.800 ? and was granted a little less than 210.000 ?. Later in the year we split off 6.000 ? to cover some risk in the BLE project (that is the "shifted to BLE" number in the spreadsheet). More than 3600 hours were accounted for, but more were actually worked (see above). We had a number of meetings in a greater circle (the Code Sprint in Berlin and the T3DD11) and a code sprint in Lübeck where the team spent a whole week together. The expenses paid can be found on the second page, consisting of a flat for everyone to stay and the meeting place as well as some travel costs paid to Sebastian - balance that against the 70 hours he did not invoice because "the sprint was a fun thing" and we come out really cheap. :) In the end a part of the budgeted money was not used, mostly because costs were lower (to a large degree due to the fact that Jens never invoiced anything). 2012 For 2012 the project applied for 247.000 ? and was granted 197.600 ? for development. An independent budget of 24.000 ? is reserved for work on the UX/UI. In addition to that there is the joint budget of 36.000 ? to be used by the v4 and Phoenix teams together - information on that can be found in this announcement. The initial budget application was presented during the T3CON11 in Hanau and some of the feedback we got there was included in a revised version. This lead to some clarifications as well as a list of features the version we plan to release later this year will have. The estimate includes the diminishing TYPO3 Association funding for Robert Lemke and myself in the third and fourth quarter of the year, which we hope to offset by external sponsoring and projects benefitting the project. As the year is still young, there's not much more to say. 2013, 2014, ? We hope that Phoenix will, once it is released, see market adoption in a way that eventually makes it possible to finance mostly maintenance while the development is made possible differently - much like it is the case for v4. Looking at the success of FLOW3 in that regard makes us optimistic, as we have rejected projects already (in favor of focusing on Phoenix). We'll see what the future brings? If you have any further questions of feedback, fire away in the comments or send me an email.

If you visit our booth at CeBIT and apply for your membership there, you will save the registration fee. Usually a new member of the TYPO3 Association has to pay a one time registration fee which is 100 EURs for a Bronze membership and 500 EURs for Silver to Platinum memberships. If you visit us at our CeBIT booth and file your application there, you will save the registration fee. Besides supporting the development of TYPO3 the membership has various advantages for you. Have a look at typo3.org/donate/association-membership/membership-benefits/ to learn more about your benefits or get in touch with us at the CeBIT booth. Also a membership (Silver level or higher) will be one requirement to be listed on our upcoming Professional Services Listing. This listing will be online with the relaunch of typo3.org about one month after CeBIT. You will find us in hall 6, booth J11 as a sub-booth of Mittwald.

The organizational structure of the TYPO3 Association isn't a proper fit anymore to the TYPO3 project's own internal structure, nor does it fit the size the project has become over time. A need for more democracy, a better separation of tasks and responsibilities and a transparent overall structure form the main motivation behind a radical change. The TYPO3 Association is a tax-exempt association established in Switzerland in 2005. It's purpose is to collect membership contributions and donations for the long term development of TYPO3. From the beginning its structure was aimed at providing a central hub from which to support active developers as well as to concentrate its members into a pool of regular contributors. This structure has become obsolete with the steady growth of the Association. Over the past year a number of members took it upon themselves to formulate a proposal which, under the somewhat ironic moniker "Perestroika", should provide the TYPO3 Association with a new structure and operating procedures. The origins of the TYPO3 Association Originally the TYPO3 Association was aimed at allowing Kasper Skårhøj and a small circle of developers around him to concentrate fully on the development of TYPO3. The projects each of them needed to work on for customers to provide their necessary income had hardly left any time for them to make any improvements to the system as a whole. On the other hand features had crept into the core of the system, at the request of customers, that weren't necessarily useful to the community as a whole. The TYPO3 Association was founded in order to raise funds for the further development of TYPO3. Even though the Association saw (and still sees!) its members as contributers, the members don't have any democratic means to determine how their contributions should be applied. This structure was initially chosen to keep the Association as simple and transparent as possible. The responsibility for budget decisions rested with a number of members who made up the Steering Committee and the Board, who joined the original founders of the Association (a Swiss 'Verein' by law). Among these people were Kasper Skårhøj, Robert Lemke, Dominic Brander, Adrian Zimmermann and a few others. This circle, while it did occasionally elect new members into its ranks, remained constant at around 12 members. The Board itself never had much formal power over the Association's means or other important subjects. It only concerned itself with accounting, communications with the media, promotional activities and it communicated with Association members. In the future the Board will be elected indirectly by all members. The election will take place on-line to make sure everyone is able to participate. Over the past years the number of TYPO3 Association members grew into the hunderds and the yearly budget is all but touching the 500.000 Euro boundary. These facts, as well as a few unclear legal and operational matters that cropped up during the last review of the Association's bylaws, necessitated a reworking of the Association's internal structure. It was clear to all involved that the Association should continue along the path towards more formal influence and authority for all members. A path already chosen with the establishment of the Business Control Committee (BCC) in February of 2010. The road towards more democracy The core of the new bylaws is aimed at providing all members with a right to vote for both of the central controlling bodies. The Expert Advisory Board (EAB) was added as a means to counterbalance the BCC. The relation between the two is similar to that between management and a supervisory board. The first concerns itself with how budget will be applied towards the direction as determined by the funded projects, while the latter checks whether the investment of funds was done properly and actually leads to the expected results. Responsibilities within the TYPO3 Association All members Elect the Expert Advisory Board and the Business Control CommitteeVote on budget applications for the next fiscal year The Expert Advisory Board Consists of six members who serve two-year terms; three of the six members will be elected each year.Distributes and manages the yearly budget on the basis of the survey resultsElects the Board The Board Consists of six members who serve two-year terms; three of the six members will be elected each year.Organizes procedures surrounding budget applications and the survey among the members.Runs the daily affairs of the Association as described in "Job Descriptions" The Business Control Committee The BCC consists of four members who each serve a two-year term; two members get elected each year.Checks the books of the Association, especially concerning the application of funds by project leaders A second goal of the restructuring was to give the members influence over budget decisions while at the same time making the assignment of budget to applicants (generally core developers) as efficient as possible. On the one hand it's impractical to have hundreds of members negotiate with around 20 applicants and attempt to reach an agreement. On the other hand we wouldn't have achieved much democracy if the Expert Advisory Board could decide over budget allication autocratically. The timeline of the new budget process is based around the dates of the TYPO3 Conference T3CON and the annual General Assembly of the TYPO3 Association, which is usually held in February. The new structure also provides new proceedings to establish the annual budget, which starts with a survey among Association members to evaluate all applications for budget. The Expert Advisory Board must use the results of this survey as its guide. In practice this means that the assignment of the yearly budget follows the result of the survey as accurately as possible, except where it considers areas such as accounting, legal matters, auditing etc. Another function of the Expert Advisory Board is to elect the Association's Board in order to ensure the smoothest possible cooperation with the body which conduncts the Association's daily affairs. To prevent conflicts of interest, budget applicants can never be members of any Association body. It's also not possible to be a member of more than one Association body at the same time. Lastly, only a single person belonging to any one company is allowed to be a member of any single Association body. In this way the TYPO3 Association hopes to achieve the broadest possible representation from the community within its official bodies, while at the same time preventing any kind of concentration of influence with any one party. Introduction of the new structure After the Kanton of Zug checks and releases the new bylaws (a legal formality required for all associations) they will come into effect after the next General Assembly in February 2012. This will be the time at which the members of the TYPO3 Association elect the first Expert Advisory Board. The existing Steering Committee will dissolve itself at that point. Because the members of the Expert Advisory Board are elected for two-year terms, half of them will need to be elected for a single year. During the months following the General Assembly the Expert Advisory Board will have time to get to grips with the administrative affairs of the Association as well as all running projects. In time for T3CON the Expert Advisory Board must put out a call for buget applications, check and publish all applications it receives and organize the members' vote on them. After the vote the Expert Advisory Board will have until the end of the year to negotiate the budget with the applicants, which they will then submit as a proposal at the next General Assembly in February of 2013. Until that time there'll be lots of work to be done in all areas of the TYPO3 Association. All those involved will be doing what they can to shape this small and peaceful revolution into a success for the TYPO3 project. All members are hereby invited to get involved. After all we still need to find the experts to evalute the contents of the project applications. Maybe one of them is even reading this article right now? Thank you Roland Schenke and Bas van der Wiel for translating the original German article the English. Thanks to T3N for letting us use the article.