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=62E3314371503C9DThe 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.