T3CON13: A reconciliation.

Last week’s T3CON was probably the best of the last three years. And this despite the fact that it was held in Leinfelden-Echterdingen in Juhee again, fewer people attended overall and the quality of the talks was average at best. So why was it still good?

 

Quite simply. Because of the mood. The spirit of optimism.

The last few years have been characterized by declining market shares, less and less product innovation, the delays surrounding 5, Phoenix, NEOS, the endless discussions about association vs. community and a competition that was catching up. Many warned, including myself, that we could rapidly lose market share with a rather old product and not yet have a new one ready to replace it. A valley of misery, if not death, was imminent. The outcome is uncertain.

Last week there was not much sign of this. The TYPO3 family was extremely positive and there was very good news:

TYPO3 NEOS will be launched on 10.12.2013
We have already heard many product announcements from the NEOS team. Data too. This time, however, they have shown us that a product is about to be launched that is unparalleled in the author experience sector. External voices from the industry have confirmed this and everything I’ve seen so far has been convincing. The subliminal message: we are back in the CMS race with TYPO3. In addition, the framework/CMF approach is in vogue and we have good cards in the enterprise segment with TYPO3 Flow/TYPO3 NEOS.

TYPO3 CMS also has plans
Jens Hoffmann ‘s presentation showed where TYPO3 CMS could take users. Exciting approaches, cool design. Even if some people are a little confused by two parallel CMS, they could become products for different segments. This would be an interesting approach, especially for customers, which no competitor offers.

Talks

The talks, on the other hand, were very average. Many of them were even bad or not relevant. Vitaly Friedman’s keynote“I want to be a webdesigner when I grow up” and the talks by Rasmus, Jens and Robert/Sebastian were good and entertaining. My personal low point was the talk by Torben Fasching from hmmh, who presented very old coffee badly and seemed somehow nervous despite the small audience. How the people from T3N came to the conclusion that the talk was critical in a positive way, I don’t know.

One talk that I heard rather bad things about was the one by Leslie Hawthorn. Praised in advance as a speaker, she apparently gave a kind of specialist lecture on community management. While this is certainly interesting, it only really concerns Ben. Accordingly, many people were disappointed who would have liked her to talk more about communities like ours.

The good news, the feeling of times long past and the many positive encounters have led to a kind of personal reconciliation for me. Reconciliation with the situation. Reconciliation with the NEOS team in particular. There is this saying: “Real artists ship”. The shipment is on December 10th and it will probably be the beginning of a good future. And artists will finally be artists and receive laurels. And, with new laurels, you can approach new things in a completely different way.

If in the future, as a group of people with the same interests and similar values (call it community or association or whatever you like), we focus on the positive, persevere in our work and understand that we are working together and not against each other, then we have a great future. In terms of atmosphere, the convention showed that this is possible and what strength can be drawn from it. I can only look forward to such a future!

By the way: The 10th T3CON will take place next year in Berlin. Videos of T3CON13 can be found here.