- exposition of a new governance model (an Ubuntu-style model) - expansion of the charter of the project to encompass open standards around enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration (not just the wiki) - greater focus on enterprise scaleability and integration standards
I want to clarify a few things to start off:
- We invite participation in the project. We took the actions that we did in order to increase the long run relevance of the project and increase the number of developers and users. We are not naïve; we certainly recognized that it would create some turmoil in the short run and that many key developers would choose to fork.
- Anyone is free to join this project. In this sense, no one has been "locked out". What we have done is ask that anyone who registers and contributes to the site adhere to a new code of conduct which very clearly specifies the new governance model. And it is important to note that the governance model isn't democratic (more on that later).
- Both TWiki.org and TWIKI.NET are fully compliant with the GPL, and furthermore, the.org is committed to an exclusively open source approach. Under the prior governance model, there were examples of closed source object modules on the site, such as various installers. We didn't think that was right.
I also want to provide a bit of background as to how I see the open source wiki and collaboration space today as a precursor to why we went with the Ubuntu-style model and adopted what is admittedly a pretty radical move.
I would characterize all of the open source projects in this space as being relatively small efforts, and all of them appear to be "thinking small" to me. That is to say they are fairly narrowly focused on some aspect of collaboration (e.g., originally TWiki was focused primarily on the wiki), or for some specific purpose (e.g., MediaWiki's primary purpose is to support Wikipedia). There simply isn't any large effort that is focused on setting open standards and providing an end-to-end open source solution for the full range of enterprise collaboration needs.
Is anyone thinking about how to create a framework and set of APIs to make it easy for arbitrary blog engines or social networking engines to attach into an enterprise collaboration framework? Is anyone thinking about how to standardize data about people, so that it can be shared between different collaboration apps? AD/LDAP approaches are all aimed at authentication and access control, not at capturing richer information about people. Is anyone thinking about how to augment the OpenSocial API to make it more relevant for enterprises and allow people to manage their social graphs between their consumer and enterprise lives, and implement clear privacy rules between the two?
The answer to all of these questions is no. I'm pretty sure the only group of people that are thinking about these problems, while using an open source and open standard approach, are the people at TWIKI.NET, some university researchers and a small number corporations that we have had discussions with.
Our vision of what we want to do for open source enterprise collaboration is pretty broad. It's going to require a lot of resource to get there. Some of that resource will be provided by open source developers, but realistically it will most likely require a lot of commercially focused effort as well. Most of the successful open source efforts out there have some closely aligned commercial entity. When I was at Cygnus Solutions from 1996-2000, roughly 80% of the development in gcc/egcs was directly f
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to respond to the recent postings regarding TWIKI.NET and the TWiki.org project.
On Monday October 27, we posted a communication regarding a "relaunch" of the TWiki.org community to the TWiki.org website.
Please see: http://www.twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/RelaunchTWikiOrgProject
The key points in that communication are:
- exposition of a new governance model (an Ubuntu-style model)
- expansion of the charter of the project to encompass open standards around enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration (not just the wiki)
- greater focus on enterprise scaleability and integration standards
I want to clarify a few things to start off:
- We invite participation in the project. We took the actions that we did in order to increase the long run relevance of the project and increase the number of developers and users. We are not naïve; we certainly recognized that it would create some turmoil in the short run and that many key developers would choose to fork.
- Anyone is free to join this project. In this sense, no one has been "locked out". What we have done is ask that anyone who registers and contributes to the site adhere to a new code of conduct which very clearly specifies the new governance model. And it is important to note that the governance model isn't democratic (more on that later).
- Both TWiki.org and TWIKI.NET are fully compliant with the GPL, and furthermore, the .org is committed to an exclusively open source approach. Under the prior governance model, there were examples of closed source object modules on the site, such as various installers. We didn't think that was right.
I also want to provide a bit of background as to how I see the open source wiki and collaboration space today as a precursor to why we went with the Ubuntu-style model and adopted what is admittedly a pretty radical move.
I would characterize all of the open source projects in this space as being relatively small efforts, and all of them appear to be "thinking small" to me. That is to say they are fairly narrowly focused on some aspect of collaboration (e.g., originally TWiki was focused primarily on the wiki), or for some specific purpose (e.g., MediaWiki's primary purpose is to support Wikipedia). There simply isn't any large effort that is focused on setting open standards and providing an end-to-end open source solution for the full range of enterprise collaboration needs.
Is anyone thinking about how to create a framework and set of APIs to make it easy for arbitrary blog engines or social networking engines to attach into an enterprise collaboration framework? Is anyone thinking about how to standardize data about people, so that it can be shared between different collaboration apps? AD/LDAP approaches are all aimed at authentication and access control, not at capturing richer information about people. Is anyone thinking about how to augment the OpenSocial API to make it more relevant for enterprises and allow people to manage their social graphs between their consumer and enterprise lives, and implement clear privacy rules between the two?
The answer to all of these questions is no. I'm pretty sure the only group of people that are thinking about these problems, while using an open source and open standard approach, are the people at TWIKI.NET, some university researchers and a small number corporations that we have had discussions with.
Our vision of what we want to do for open source enterprise collaboration is pretty broad. It's going to require a lot of resource to get there. Some of that resource will be provided by open source developers, but realistically it will most likely require a lot of commercially focused effort as well. Most of the successful open source efforts out there have some closely aligned commercial entity. When I was at Cygnus Solutions from 1996-2000, roughly 80% of the development in gcc/egcs was directly f