Cool. Foswiki was mentioned in an Enterprise 2.0 study from Centrestage.
The Foswiki community summit last year was a big success. A lot of participants founded an association and had a lot of fun. Some of them talked to me on the camera. Hear and see what they had to say about foswiki:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=62E3314371503C9DI just read a list of good arguments from Colas Nahaboo for Foswiki on the Foswiki mailing list and wanted to post them here quickly:
Our Foswiki at work (ILOG, then IBM) is in place since 2001, and has now 60,000 pages. In my view, the main strengths of Foswiki wrt mediawiki are:
- Utter reliability: it can run unattended for months without a worry, it relies only on the filesystem. And if the filesystem is on a NAS…. automatic continous backup for free!
- Resilience: it survived problems such as no more disk space, power outages, hard disk failures with no damage nor corruptions
- Integration: you can use Foswiki pages as front-end applications to services, or as display of programs results, as the engine just handle text files that are easy to handle or generate by any scripting language you like. For instance we use a separate search engine (now a Google appliance) to provide full text searching.
- Power: If you are used to the unix way of thinking (data is defined as simple text in files, and you use shell/perl/python/ruby/C/… scripts to manage them) then any kind of feature can be added to Foswiki as the engine is geared to having its data files changed by other processes too, thanks to its dynamic nature. The great feature of Foswiki is that users can code a feature via Foswiki Macros, and other users can copy/paste/enhance this code which is not hidden like the php of Mediawiki extensions.
- On the performance problems, the main drawback of this dynamicity is that a lot of things are recomputed on each requests, e.g. some ”macros” in Foswiki that search in pages can be slow. But things can be optimised quite a bit by separating the contents into different directories, and coding special scripts or plugins to optimize the bottlenecks. Flat files are not slow per se (a grep in our 60,000 pages takes 10 seconds), it is just that we lack now the equivalent of ”indexes” you have with a database. But the community is working on this.
I would add that whether you choose Mediawiki or Foswiki, your technical team is expected to invest some time to understand how the system works. I guess in the end the decisive factor is whether your people are more at ease with php+mysql or with traditional Unix scripting.
Colas
Read the whole mail-conversation including a happy ending here on our Nabble-documentation online.
Did you know that the Foswiki community is actively trying to create a complete new interaction design for you and your users. Especially Arthur Clemens and Carlo Schulz are actively creating concepts how the Foswiki surface can be improved and be more easily to understand and use.
A lot of community members think that usability improvements for Foswiki are one of the most important ways to increase Foswikis adoption within your company and within the market.
If you want to help us, please comment on these drafts and help us to understand, what you and your users need.
You can find discussions and much more information on the progress in our Wiki under RethinkingTopicInteraction (incl. all pictures) and RethinkingTopicInteractionPrototype. Please tell us, what you think.
Foswiki summit begins today and lasts until tomorrow. Did you know that you can participate from your home computer remotely? Yes, you can.
One goal of the Foswiki community is to be open and transparent. That’s why we try to incorporate all technical means available to help you join the summit from your remote desktop.
Here is what you can do:
That is where we expect the most activity and documentation, because this is the channel we use most often in the day-to-day community communication. Here is how you can get on our IRC channel.
We will try to document and update the wiki regularly. You can monitor these changes by looking at all changes in all webs.
Some of the summit’s participants are fond of Google Wave and will try to use it for our conference live documentation in addition to other channels. Find all public Google Waves about Foswiki here.
The service etherpad.com offers live text collaboration that is much faster than Google Wave and more powerful than IRC chat. It will turn out during our sessions, if this is going to be utilized a lot. Thank you to Colas Nahaboo for the tip. Here is the etherpad-document.
It is unsure if the web connection in hannover and our technical equipment will make it possible to offer a video stream. But if so we will. Find out on the IRC chat what the current state is. Not established until now. Lets see …
We are looking forward to virtually meet you for our first Foswiki Community Summit.
Martin Seibert on behalf of the physical participants in Hannover
Participants of the last TWiki summit
Did you know, that Foswiki is now an officially registered association with bylaws and all that is needed, to prevent that community from being influence by commercial interests? Yay! Thank you once more to Jens Hanssen and a lot of others to make this possible. we want to have our very first general assembly and use it also for our first Foswiki Summit.
The event takes place on the 21st and 22nd of November 2009 in Hannover, Germany. We will meet at Krokus (Stadtteilzentrum Kronsberg), Thie 6, 30539 Hannover (see on Google Maps for more details). There are already 16 community members registered for the event. Almost all of us gather for an informal Get-Together already on Friday at 8 pm at the restaurant Cheers, Marschnerstrasse 2, Hannover (Map, public transportation: Station “Christuskirche”, Line 6).
We would love to see you there also. The event is free to attend and you do not have to become a Foswiki Association member, if you participate. Everybody is welcome.
Register for the event by simply adding your name in our summit wiki page!
Gathering with the Foswiki community is a lot of fun
TWiki.net is successful and has compelling language in its marketing materials. The organization jazzed up its website, has participated in several wiki competitions, and are mentioned in blog posts on wikis. For the uniniated, TWiki.org and TWiki.net are controlled by the same organization. While TWiki.org is the “open source” face of TWiki.net, TWiki.net is siginificantly a marketing arm of TWiki.net, funneling sales leads from the former to the latter.
I am writing this article not as a rant against TWiki, but in the interest of all those who consider TWiki as their enterprise wiki and want to compare it with Foswiki. As this is the official Foswiki weblog, there will be a bias for Foswiki. Nevertheless, I have tried an even-handed approach to the material below, attempting to keep any “spin” to a minimum. Here are my theses that I will lay out in detail later:
- Twiki.net is good at marketing. But their marketing won’t buy you the love for the product from your employees. It converts into nothing you need in your company.
- But TWiki has modest product development underway and little active community. But these attributes are what you need as a customer. You need a slick product. You need developers who enhance your solution with plugins and innovate. And a product needs an active and living community to foster its development.
- Foswiki has a strong product development and a strong community. That is important for you as a customer. In TWiki there is no strong community left.
Video Trailer for this blog post:
I will now address the areas “Community”, “Product development” and “Marketing” in more detail:
Although it might not evident at first sight, the people behind a product are most important for the success of the product in the long run. There is no product development and no innovation without a community.
The leftovers at TWiki.net are Peter Thoeny and his employees. There is little community activity to be seen, unfortunately. It would also be cool for TWiki.net to have an active community instead of what we see now. If Twiki does not change the lack of community soon, it will simply die from inactivity in product development eventually. If you look at the download page of the open source product TWiki you will see 13 links to the “commercial owner” TWiki.net. Before you can download you are requested to fill out a form. And the form contents go to where? To TWiki.net. 
This is not the environment for professional consultants. This is a way to ensure no professional community evolves.
13 links to the commercial entity TWiki.net dry out community-activity.
The TWiki Download-Area is also only a marketing data collection activity for TWiki.net. Is that open source?
The people who developed TWiki during the last 10 years have moved to Foswiki. These people have founded a democratic and fully-independent Foswiki association Foswiki community members report the wiki development is now fun again. And that’s what makes projects like Foswiki thrive. A good, active, and living community is the basis of every successful open source project.
TWiki.net seems to have concentrated on marketing and left the development up to Foswiki. TWiki.net can incorporate Foswiki code in their software quite easily as both applications share the same code base. All that might be new and probably developed by Peter Thoeny is proprietory and for sale. I have my doubts that this practice of depriving the community of new features is compliant with the GPL. That might also be simple ignorance. But all these exclusive “features” cannot be seen and assessed. To date, I have not seen a video or a screenshot or a thorough description of these “exclusive” features. You should be very cautious if things are only promised but not shown.
Back to community development. To my knowledge, there is not a single feature in TWiki that would not have been available in Foswiki before. And I am watching TWiki pretty closely.
Within 11 months since the TWiki fork Foswiki was created, we saw more than 5000 code checkins from developers. A lot of new plugins have been made available to extend your user experience. I want to point to three of them:
These are just three of numerous examples that they really rock in my opinion.
Foswiki has fixed 400 bugs that are still unresolved in TWiki. Did you know that?
Foswiki is an open source wiki that rocks. If I am asked what to choose if you are searching for a true open source wiki, I highly recommend Foswiki as an open source enterprise wiki.
Disclaimer: This blog post only reflects the view of Martin Seibert as an individual. It is not an official statement of the Foswiki community and it might not represent all opinions. Additionally, as I have been kicked out of the TWiki-community like all other members last year, I might have missed certain details. I am happy for you to add them through the commenting feature below.
The Foswiki community loves Kenneth Larvsen for releasing the next Foswiki version 1.0.7 last Monday with the following email:
Release of Foswiki version 1.0.7, 20 Sep 2009
On behalf of the entire Foswiki community I can proudly announce the
release of the Foswiki patch release 1.0.7Foswiki 1.0.7 is available for download at the following locations
* Foswiki web site: http://foswiki.org/Download
Since the January release of 1.0.0 more than 190 additional bugs have
been fixed.Foswiki 1.0.7 was built 20 Sep 2009. It is a patch release with more
than 190 bug fixes relative to 1.0.0 and some enhancements. This release
fixes some serious issues introduced by the CSRF fix and the redirect
cache fix in 1.0.6. Major enhancement that also fixes many annoying
editor bugs is the upgrade of the !Tiny MCE editor to version 3.2.2.It is highly recommended to upgrade your Foswiki to 1.0.7.
You can read the full email here.
Important Changes since Foswiki 1.0.6
The 09th of September 2009 is a very important date for the whole Foswiki-community and all users of its wiki-software. You might still remember how the hostile takeover of the TWiki.org-webserver by Peter Thoeny and his TWiki.net-company let to the creation of Foswiki, the successful TWiki-fork.
Foswiki has been full of activity after the fork and we are happy to see, that former TWiki-contributors have almost completely moved to Foswiki and more and more new developers have started to join the young Foswiki-project.
We will run a series of blog posts, that will show you new plugins and features, that do not and will most likely never exist in TWiki, that are already available in the Foswiki-core-repository.
To prevent a dependency to single individuals in the future, the forkers have started to work on a Foswiki-association ever since the fork was created. Namely Jens Hansen and André Ulrich pushed the project of founding a Foswiki-association with their TaskTeam.
The result will be an official entity, that has professional bylaws and will be led by true and fair democratic principles, that will guarantee an independent, strong and transparent community leadership. At the moment the Foswiki association is pending in the registration process. That will last for about 4 weeks. These are the official bylaws of the Foswiki-community, which are available in English and German language:
The official Foswiki Articles Association
The official founding protocol is only available in German:
Founding Protocol Foswiki Association
“On Wednesday the 09.09.2009 we came together for the initial Founding of the Foswiki Association. After four hours of meeting it was created – articles explained and agreed, iInitial board elected as well as signatures approved with the notary. Afterwards we took a beer and had some nice chats. I guess we will manage to upload some pictures during the weekend.
Oh by the way…This is the (temporary) board:
- Chairman: André Ulrich
- Vice Chairman: Ingo Kappler
- Treasurer: Oliver Krüger
- Member of Board: Oliver Laudenbach
- Member of Board: Markus Ueberall
Congratulations and thanks for the effort. Some of you did a lot of traveling to make this possible.”
Foswiki is now one out of few if not the only free-and-open-source-wiki for enterprises that has an official association, to back it. We hope that this will increase the trust in our project and will protect us from shortcomings, that we suffered from as the “real” TWiki-community.
The community is now preparing a general community gathering to let all association members vote on a new and legitimate board of directors. The community assembly will be both physical and virtual. So please help us creating the agenda and join the Foswiki community for this virtual assembly.
We need your support to make Foswiki an on-going success. Here is how you can help us.
There has been a lot of cheering for the founding members going on in our mailing list already. Cheer us up by commenting this topic.
Foswiki is now also available over a FreeBSD port. See the following mail vom Greg Larkin:
I just committed the initial version of the FreeBSD port for Foswiki
1.0.6: http://www.freshports.org/www/foswiki/This port enables you to install Foswiki on FreeBSD with the simple
command:cd /usr/ports/www/foswiki && make install clean
I’m still working on some scaffolding in the port to support
auto-generated Foswiki plugin ports. Once that’s done, I’ll add a port
for each plugin found in http://svn.foswiki.org/trunk/.If anyone has feedback, bug reports or patches, please send them along!
If you want to make Foswiki adapt better to your needs help us to improve this open source software.
