Restarting the Italian community

Application by
Roberto Torresani

What is your idea about?
In recent years, due to various reasons, the Italian community has not continued along the path started more than ten years ago with the organisation of the first T3Camp Italia.
In order to start again, it is necessary to reach both historical and new TYPO3 users, to create again a group for the exchange of ideas and support in case of difficulties, and not to leave everyone alone to his own work.

What is the potential impact of your idea?
Improve awareness and use of TYPO3 in Italy by facilitating synergies and contacts with foreign communities and/or companies.

Who can / should implement your idea?
I will take care myself

Approximate Funds needed
€5,000 - €10,000

1 Like

In light of a bunch of budgets related to expanding the community to several regions, would it be beneficial to have one dedicated team with a larger budget to organize events in countries / regions where people are interested to start an initiative / event?

In my opinion there can be a central team who helps and urges the various communities to organise activities, but the initiatives must start from the communities of each nation.
I can bring my experience from Italy. In our case we are a very large country, more than 1000 km long, with few TYPO3 users. Organising meetings in person always risks excluding someone and putting them in difficulty. Therefore, we need to find the most appropriate venue each time, knowing that many of the few TYPO3 users may have difficulty attending. Also the interests might be different, so a dedicated activity has to be built according to the people who can participate. I think that from the outside it is difficult to respond to all the needs if you are not in close contact with the group.
At this point in time, the Italian core group needs to be reconstituted, because a number of things have changed in recent years.
It would be different if you were to organise a TYPO3 presentation to an audience that does not know TYPO3 yet. In this case there can certainly be a much closer relationship with a central team, where community leaders make contacts with universities and third party events and organise a basic presentation on TYPO3 functionalities.
Another aspect to take into account is the language. English is a universal language but it always creates a barrier, especially for the less young Italians, who may be the ones making decisions in the company.
To sum up: I’m positive about a central team of the communities, but the bulk of the work has to start from the community, otherwise we risk losing good opportunities as I’ve seen happen in the past.

Hi Roberto,
can you estimate how the funds be primarily spend – expenses, effort/working hrs, etc.?
When thinking about expenses it might be possible to win a sponsor.
thx, Daniel

The budget for the activity is definitely less than €10,000, but it will depend a lot on the feedback we get.
The idea is not to organise a conference or periodic meetups, where, as you suggest, there could be the help of some sponsors, but after a first phase of reconstituting a strong group, contact universities and third party conferences to introduce TYPO3 to a new audience.
For each of these there will be contact and preparation costs (indicatively this could be 30%), travel costs (indicatively 60%) and possible participation costs (indicatively 20%). This last cost item will only be used for possible participations of national importance. The activities will be aimed at universities/associations and events that can host us “without” participation costs.
As you can understand, it all depends very much on the positive responses we can get. We have some contacts with universities and other communities, but the hope is to have many more contacts.
I hope I have managed to answer your question, if necessary ask me and I will try to elaborate.

@benni Last year, we had the ambitious CoCoMOn project which “rolled up” a bunch of these outreach/expansion efforts (it was focused on agencies). Based on that experience, I would rather see these smaller local projects, where the strategy can be more agile and driven by regional markets.

@erreti The TYPO3 Marketing Team can probably lend a hand with materials and outreach enablement so you are not starting from scratch. This could reduce the cost and time needed for your project. Knowing that we have these TYPO3 resources is why I could propose a very similar project for the US with a lower budget (€5000).

A team who coordinates the activities of the communities in the various countries can be of help. As I wrote above, the organization must start from the communities, otherwise there is a risk of wasting energy.
Comparisons between communities can also be of great help.