Hey there, I’m Martin! I had my first contact with the TYPO3 community through mittwald, where I built my first TYPO3 site in 2004 and attended my first TYPO3 conference in 2009. In the time since then, I’ve had various roles at mittwald, from ranging from software engineering, devops, platform architecture, product strategy and developer advocacy & evangelism — all of which aimed (in many different ways) at making open Source CMS and e-commerce platforms more accessible and more easily available. My current role at mittwald allows me to combine product strategy and DevRel full-time, enabling me to spend a significant amount of time in the TYPO3 community, but also granting me insights into the larger Open Source CMS community as a whole.
Ah. It should also be pointed out that @discobot’s initial post in this thread contains the wrong bio. It should not be much of a surprise that I am, in fact, not the CEO of dkd. The original voting page shows the correct bio.
I’d like to ask you some questions about things I find important for the TYPO3 Association and the TYPO3 community. (By the way, all of these questions have a story behind them.)
I’ll ask all candidates for the Board the same questions in order to allow the voters to make a more informed decision, and to help get the best people voted into the Board. So answering these questions would be a chance to shine and to show what’s different about you.
I’d really appreciate if you took the time to answer these questions (or some of them, depending on which topics you find important). Thanks!
thanks for your questions. I believe that you raise some very important points about leadership and the culture and values that we as an Open Source community want to uphold. As I already mentioned in our call, I agree with you on many aspects concerning the culture of (servant) leadership in the community and the importance of a strongly-enforced Code of Conduct.
When reading the questions, I however got the impression that some of them were phrased in a very leading manner, and seemingly refer to specific past events (which you’ve told me about in our call, but of which I do not have a complete picture). I feel that the way some of the questions are worded does not really allow me to present a differentiated set of my personal opinions on these matters. For this reason, I have decided not to answer each question individually, but to still share my personal perspective on the (presumed) intent behind each group of questions, in the hope that this manner of response is still helpful for you and anyone else reading along.
In your first block of questions, you ask about my thoughts about the role and responsibilities of the Board within the Association. The Board consists of elected representatives of the community, and as such has as much (or as few) authority as the community wants to give it. In this light, a strictly top-down management style in which decisions are made without support of the members is inherently even more unsustainable as it would be in a traditional corporate environment. Instead, the purpose of the Board should be to create and foster an environment in which the community can grow and the teams and each member of the community are empowered to contribute their best to the community and the project. I furthermore believe it a responsibility of the board to provide direction and vision for key aspects of community and product development. However, these decisions cannot be based on pure authority, and must be made together with everyone involved and by facilitating a shared consensus. Mutual trust between all involved is a key requirement for this.
Your second block of questions is about the personal qualifications of Board members as well as communication and feedback culture within the Board itself. I believe that empathy, integrity and the ability to admit (and correct) your own mistakes are key qualifications for any kind of leadership position. I also have always strived to live by these values in my own work in the leadership positions that I hold and held in the past – and expect honest feedback from my peers (like my fellow members of the board, or any member of the community, really) if I should ever fall short of these values, so that I can improve.
The final block of questions is about safety in the community, the Code of Conduct specifically and the structures in the Association. Building and fostering an environment in which every member of the community can feel safe and respected is paramount. This includes a strongly-enforced Code of Conduct that is applied consistently to everyone without exceptions. You also asked some very specific questions about the people enforcing the code of conduct (which presumably refers to the ombudsperson group), which I feel are too tightly coupled to a specific situation in the past for me to phrase a generally applicable answer to.
I hope my answers, even when in a different format than requested, are helpful to you. Feel free to reach out if there’s anything else you’d like to know.
Contributing to the TYPO3 Board is a significant responsibility, demanding an average of 0.5 to 1 day per week. This involves (list is not complete and not sorted by amount of work):
Regular board meetings
Virtual and in person meetings with teams and groups
Quartarly multi day in person meetings with the board
Long answer:
I am aware of the amount of time that contribution to the Board requires. After speaking to other (both current and prospective) Board members, I already came to the conclusion that the “official” requirement of 4hrs/week was probably the low end of the range of estimations, so I’m not running into this under the impression of this being an easy side-gig. Instead, if elected, I fully intend to give this role the amount of effort needed to fulfil my (high) personal standards for a job well done, not just the bare minimum. I am in the lucky situation that mittwald fully supports my involvement in the community and that my role already allows me a very flexible schedule to take time out of as needed; on top of that, I am also willing and prepared to invest additional time from my personal schedule when required.
Regarding attendance at events: We run into each other often enough, so you already know that I’m already a regular attendee of most (if not all) events (both the official events, and community events) due to my DevRel role at mittwald, which I fully intend to keep up.
(Obviously, I will have to learn how to wear two different hats at the same time, but that would be getting a bit out-of-scope for this question, and something that other Board members also do successfully).
Ping me on any channel that you’d like (in this thread, Slack, LinkedIn, whatever) if you have any questions!