Official Foswiki Weblog

The Foswiki Association is pleased to announce its 3rd General Assembly and Birthday Celebration, 19th-20th November 2011, at CERN Geneva.

• http://foswiki.org/Community/AgendaThirdGeneralAssembly

This is a great opportunity to meet some of the faces behind the IRC handles, to talk about Foswiki, and an excuse to visit the lovely Geneva area.

All association members are very welcome to attend. We’d love to meet you in person, but if you can’t make it physically we’ll be setting up channels to help you join in virtually. If you’re not a member of the Foswiki association yet, see http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers – all are welcome.

We’re also excited to be holding our first one-day FoswikiCamp on the 18th November 2011 at CERN Geneva (the day before the GA). The plan is to have one or more fun “sprints”to scratch some itches that have been bothering us. See

• http://foswiki.org/Community/FoswikiCamp

The GA is open to all association members, and the camp is open to anyone. Due to access controls at CERN we need to know in advance if you are coming, so please add your name to the relevant lists in the Foswiki topics linked above.

(We might even have a Foswiki release 1.1.4 to celebrate too!)

Update: Every year on the General Assembly people have the opportunity to become a Foswiki Member. This is a great way to help Foswiki to grow and gives you the right to vote on any decisions to be made on a General Assembly as well. To apply for membership add yourself to http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers#Membership_Applications and contact two of the current Foswiki Members to support your application.

Crawford Currie Event

The Foswiki community is doing well.  We are developing and we are releasing and we are supporting and responding.

Task number are now 5 digit numbers and SVN checkins are getting close to 10000. That is an average of around 10-15 per day incl weekends.

The practical household and legal ownership is the responsibility of the Foswiki Association.

It is not the Foswiki Association that develops the software or answers support questions. The Association mainly take care that we have working webservers and software repository. And we ensure the project has a roadmap and that tasks teams are working and empowered. And we own the Foswiki name and the domain names. In every day life the community should not notice the association. Thing should just work. And they do. Very well.

It is a year ago since we had the founding General Assembly. The General Assembly is the higest authority and its main purpose is to elect the executive board and approve accounting and budgets.So we will soon have the 2nd General Assembly. Because of some tax detail in Germany we were not ready for November and December is holiday time so the 2nd General Assembly will be held in the beginning of January.

There is a Doodle vote in progress to find the best date. http://www.doodle.com/h2b5kqm5skyrgtfu

The official invitation will be sent out 6 weeks before the date we decide via the Doodle vote. The general assembly will be a conference call on the phone. You will not need to travel to participate.

We welcome new members.

You do not need to be a member of the association to be a contributor to the project. Anyone can contribute code, proposals, etc. But if you want to support the work and have influence on the executiveboard then we are happy to see you as member. Current membership fee is 10 Euros per year so in practical membership is free.

The rules for membership are described in the articles of the association and they require the following steps

1. You need to contact an existing member of the association and ask him/her to recommend you as member. If you have been visible on IRC or this mailing list, or on the foswiki.org site, we are many that will be happy to recommend you. Any member can recommend a new member incl. board members.
2. The member and yourself will then need to find two other members that will support your membership. The member that recommends you will help finding the additional two supporting members.
3. When you have the 3 names, you contact one of the 5 board members and we will put you on the list. You will be able to participate in the next General Assembly if you are on this list. You can contact Kenneth Lavrsen kenneth@lavrsen.dk.
4. One of the first steps at the General Assembly will be to accept the list of new members. This will normally be a formality. Once passed this point you are a full member and can vote for proposals and for the board and even become a member of the board.

For existing members I need to remind that participation at the next General Assembly requires that you have paid your 10 Euro membership fee. Many of you have wanted to, but could not because we had trouble setting up the needed accounts while waiting for German tax authorities. We are fixing this now. But before the January general assembly membership fees must be paid. You will soon receive an email that tells you how you can pay the 10 Euros. Approx 60% of the members have not been able to pay the fee so don’t feel too bad about it. If you already know now that you are not interested, please email Kenneth Lavrsen.

The resources you need.

To find an existing member of the association look at -http://foswiki.org/Community/CurrentFoswikiMembers

The members of the board to send the application to:http://foswiki.org/Community/Association#Board You can e-mail me at kenneth@lavrsen.dk both to be recommended and for the registration.

The association articles can be found at -http://foswiki.org/Community/AssociationArticles – Note that we are in a ping-pong with the German tax authorities about the exact wording of the purpose of the articles but don’t worry. We are not changing to become a football club. It is minor tax technical details that are discussed. It is this tax discussion that has delayed the 2nd general assembly which was supposed to be in November. Please forgive us but we try to avoid having to have an extraordinary assembly.

Regards

Kenneth Lavrsen

Deputy Chair and Secretary of the Foswiki Board.

klavrsen Event association, community, foswiki, general-assembly

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:

1. Chairman: André Ulrich
2. Vice Chairman: Ingo Kappler
3. Treasurer: Oliver Krüger
4. Member of Board: Oliver Laudenbach
5. 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.

mseibert Event andreulrich, association, community, foswiki, jenshansen, press release