The Read/Write Web

At the PHP conference in Frankfurt the keynote speaker, Tim Bray, director of web technologies at Sun Microsystems, talked on Web 2.0. Rather than dancing the buzz-dance, he described the essence of this new focus as the "read/write" web contrary to the "read-only" web. I think this expresses the point much better: A web where people are involved in creating content. As an Open Source community that is inherently our identity! Or should be. It definitely seems like the strength that has built our most important successes – for instance the Extension repository – and simultaneously the reason for our biggest problems. I suppose there Web 2.0 holds an interesting wisdom that is also the very strength of a community like ours and the edge we will always have over a tightly controlled commercial software project.

Enabling people to participate

So, is TYPO3 Web 2.0 ready? No, we probably haven't seen the forest for all the trees yet. But we are slowly waking up! And isn't it great that those same principles that make a read/write web powerful are the very foundation of our success in the past? This seems like a free lunch to me. A fruit that is just waiting to be picked. So simple. In more practical terms, it means that we should offer greatly improved interaction services on our community websites. Services that enable automatical meritocracy-based "social mobility" in the developer pool. For TYPO3 as a product, it means consolidated ways to produce such services in frontend plugins.

The Broadway Show is over

Okay, so these are some thoughts. What many of you might miss is the roadmap. The fact is, that there is no such thing as a roadmap unless someone takes the responsibility to shape it and implement it. A "public" roadmap for TYPO3 is inherently incompatible with a vision of an organic read/write community which is responsible for its own fate. So, enough of that. TYPO3's future is not a show on Broadway where you can lean back and watch, it is an interactive play which you are able to influence directly and where you are responsible for the end result. Or this is what it should be. A festival. Welcome in, honestly.

Der Autor

Als TYPO3-Gründer und Präsident der TYPO3 Association leitet Kasper Skårhøj die Aufgaben der T3A zusammen mit anderen aktiven Mitgliedern. In seiner Freizeit raucht Kasper Zigarren und renoviert sein Haus. Er lebt mit seiner Frau Rie und seiner kleinen Tochter Amelie in Kopenhagen, Dänemark.