Dear XWiki Developers, In order to better ensure the long term success of the xwiki open source project, we need to work on making xwiki.org a place where sponsoring companies (the main one being XWiki SAS) can thrive and get some revenues from their contributions to the project (thus allowing them to invest and even increase their investment in open source).
Actually we've already started this a while ago by defining our governance process at http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Governance. This mail is about going further in this direction and providing more leverage for sponsoring companies. Without further ado, here's a list of actions I'm proposing: A) On the download page, introduce a form (that can be skipped) to let user enter their details (name, email) to accept to receive offers, discuss business projects, and provide onboarding help/tips from companies creating XWiki. Since XWiki SAS is currently hosting and maintaining xwiki.org, I'm proposing that the user details will be sent by mail to some XWiki SAS email address (i.e. XWiki SAS will be operating user data gathering on behalf of xwiki.org, which has no legal entity). On the other side, XWiki SAS will provide those information to other companies offering a good level of code contribution to the development of XWiki: I'm proposing the threshold of 3 active committers to be able to receive those contact details. B) Similarly, inside the XWiki product, on the Admin user creation screen in the Distribution Wizard or elsewhere (place to be defined), have some checkbox to accept to receive news/onboarding tips/offers from companies creating XWiki. It'll work the same and send an email to some XWiki SAS-operated email address. And again XWiki SAS will redistribute the information to companies having more than 3 active committers on the project. C) Add a Support/Offer Panel inside the default XWiki flavor where companies creating XWiki can advertising their services/offers. In addition, find a place, maybe in some Admin UI menu for providing the same information + a configuration option to remove this panel from the UI. D) Allow companies creating XWiki to publish blog entries to present new offers/services/extensions. We don't want this to turn into spam so the rule could be no more than 1 such blog entry/mail per month to start with and those entries need to be presented in a nice community-oriented way. E) Similarly, allow top sponsoring companies (XWiki SAS at the moment) to create a monthly newsletter sent to the users list, gathering news about the xwiki ecosystem in general (product news, events, new offers/services/paying extensions, tips, etc). There could also be surveys. XWiki SAS is happy to start this effort and to gather such news from other sponsoring companies to include them in the newsletter. The idea is to let the community be more aware of all news that exists be them free or for pay, and in addition also advertise conferences at which xwiki is represented, etc. F) Find a good place in the XWiki runtime (maybe rework the Admin UI home page to remove the current icons which don't bring any useful information) to display the xwiki.org blog. The idea is to provide news from inside XWiki but not make it intrusive to users (hence the idea of locating it somewhere in the Admin UI). Of course we need handle the fallback when the instance is not connected to the internet or behind a proxy. G) Since XWiki SAS is paying for hosting and maintaining xwiki.org, the idea is to mention this on xwiki.org, possibly in a panel or in the footer (as we do our other sponsors) H) Put some company logos of companies using xwiki on the home page or somewhere visible to advertise more the xwiki software: "hey, look, those companies are using XWiki”. I) Increase the visibility for the top sponsoring company. Today we have an issue is that the company that sponsors the big majority of the source code is not much more visible than companies which sponsor less than 1% of the code. Right now we're saying on [[http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/Governance]]: "The commercial offerings are listed in the order of their contribution levels, the biggest contributor getting the top spot. In order to keep it simple the contribution level corresponds to the number of active Committers.". I'd like to keep the spirit but I believe we need to change the implementation. Right now all companies are put one under another. This has the effect of making it more confusing for users to choose and doesn't reflect the level of contributions of companies. So the new rule I'd like to have is that on all pages where we list companies, we make the top contributing company displayed very visibly and have a link for other companies, leading to another page where they advertise for their services and offers. J) Allow sponsoring companies to have paying extensions on extensions.xwiki.org, under any license (open source or not). Here’s my +1 Thanks -Vincent Massol Hat 1: CTO XWiki SAS Hat 2: XWiki Core Committer _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
