Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Today got a link to this book http://www.aosabook.org/en/index.html Can't find chapter about XWiki ;) -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p7308429.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
On Jan 21, 2012, at 12:42 AM, coldserenity wrote: Hi, Today I have noticed that XWiki made it into a commercial solution * http://www.cloudbees.com/platform-ecosystem.cb * http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloudbees-adds-mongohq-papertrail-and-xwiki-to-integrated-partner-ecosystem-of-hosted-cloud-services-for-java-developers-2011-10-24 My congratulations! :) Yes this is very cool and did a lot of good advertising for the xwiki project :) One more observation that XWiki is primarily presented in European counties on 2012.01.21 following request http://www.google.com/trends/?q=XWikictab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0 produced 1.Algeria 2.France 3.Morocco 4.Czech Republic 5.Switzerland 6.Belgium 7.Romania 8.Singapore 9.Austria 10. India I think it's essential to get other markets to increase the community (north America comes first to mind, however taking into consideration number of population - China, India and fast growing Latin America world that might depend) Indeed, any recommendation? BTW this is strange since xwiki.org website is in English and there's no reason only people from Europe would use it. Maybe Europe countries use more open source than say in the USA. UK is not in the list either which is strange too. Thanks -Vincent ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Well, I do have one idea. Appear more in the news. Why don't you use that news about XWiki becoming part of cloudbees platform and post it into most popular technical news-sites e.g. http://www.infoq.com/ (western English-speaking world) http://habrahabr.ru/ (Russia and Ukraine) http://www.roseindia.net/ (Indian) those I recollect off-hand, there are definitely more. You could also prepare some case-studies on the technical part of XWiki and on the innovations adopted there, and post the info to the above sites or even to something like https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat -Original Message- From: users-boun...@xwiki.org [mailto:users-boun...@xwiki.org] On Behalf Of Vincent Massol Sent: Saturday, January 21, 2012 13:21 PM To: XWiki Users Subject: Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community On Jan 21, 2012, at 12:42 AM, coldserenity wrote: Hi, Today I have noticed that XWiki made it into a commercial solution * http://www.cloudbees.com/platform-ecosystem.cb * http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloudbees-adds-mongohq-papertrail-and -xwiki-to-integrated-partner-ecosystem-of-hosted-cloud-services-for-ja va-developers-2011-10-24 My congratulations! :) Yes this is very cool and did a lot of good advertising for the xwiki project :) One more observation that XWiki is primarily presented in European counties on 2012.01.21 following request http://www.google.com/trends/?q=XWikictab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0 produced 1.Algeria 2.France 3.Morocco 4.Czech Republic 5.Switzerland 6.Belgium 7.Romania 8.Singapore 9.Austria 10. India I think it's essential to get other markets to increase the community (north America comes first to mind, however taking into consideration number of population - China, India and fast growing Latin America world that might depend) Indeed, any recommendation? BTW this is strange since xwiki.org website is in English and there's no reason only people from Europe would use it. Maybe Europe countries use more open source than say in the USA. UK is not in the list either which is strange too. Thanks -Vincent ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
snip One more observation that XWiki is primarily presented in European counties on 2012.01.21 following request http://www.google.com/trends/?q=XWikictab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0 produced 1. Algeria 2. France 3. Morocco 4. Czech Republic 5. Switzerland 6. Belgium 7. Romania 8. Singapore 9. Austria 10. India I think it's essential to get other markets to increase the community (north America comes first to mind, however taking into consideration number of population - China, India and fast growing Latin America world that might depend) Indeed, any recommendation? BTW this is strange since xwiki.org website is in English and there's no reason only people from Europe would use it. Maybe Europe countries use more open source than say in the USA. UK is not in the list either which is strange too. Thanks -Vincent I agree, hit the US and Canadian markets as Xwiki has the potential to become huge out there. Actually living in the UK and then taking a 2 year sabbatical to Turkey I would have thought that opensource in the US and Canada were going to be much larger then anywhere in Europe.. since most opensource projects kind of kick-start out there and there is a huge following of Linux/BSD among other things. Turkey I can definitely say is a 99.% MS based environment with almost everybody using Sharepoint as the - wiki, mainsite, collaboration suite etc - actually I went out there as a UNIX engineer and ended up an MS slave as my first position was as a Sharepoint admin. Afterwards when I went to en enterprise grade investment company they even used Sharepoint there even though I tried to politically incline them towards opensource source especially Xwiki but in their own terms: 'there was no support as mailing lists aren't considered support and nobody would understand how to work it'. In the UK while job hunting I do express my knowledge in Xwiki to any company I come into contact with and again the response usually is 'We use Sharepoint in this firm'. It's just unfortunate that I am not in a senior (or any) position here with a bunch of contacts in the same place as I definitely would try to get Xwiki on the map! I must sincerely appologies for this as I am a huge fan of Xwiki - bar the inability to upgrade versions currently but that's still a work in progress ;-) But if there's anything I can do to help the project I will in anyway I can! Regards, Kaya ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
On Jan 21, 2012, at 2:41 PM, Kaya Saman wrote: snip One more observation that XWiki is primarily presented in European counties on 2012.01.21 following request http://www.google.com/trends/?q=XWikictab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0 produced 1. Algeria 2. France 3. Morocco 4. Czech Republic 5. Switzerland 6. Belgium 7. Romania 8. Singapore 9. Austria 10. India I think it's essential to get other markets to increase the community (north America comes first to mind, however taking into consideration number of population - China, India and fast growing Latin America world that might depend) Indeed, any recommendation? BTW this is strange since xwiki.org website is in English and there's no reason only people from Europe would use it. Maybe Europe countries use more open source than say in the USA. UK is not in the list either which is strange too. Thanks -Vincent I agree, hit the US and Canadian markets as Xwiki has the potential to become huge out there. Actually living in the UK and then taking a 2 year sabbatical to Turkey I would have thought that opensource in the US and Canada were going to be much larger then anywhere in Europe.. since most opensource projects kind of kick-start out there and there is a huge following of Linux/BSD among other things. Turkey I can definitely say is a 99.% MS based environment with almost everybody using Sharepoint as the - wiki, mainsite, collaboration suite etc - actually I went out there as a UNIX engineer and ended up an MS slave as my first position was as a Sharepoint admin. Afterwards when I went to en enterprise grade investment company they even used Sharepoint there even though I tried to politically incline them towards opensource source especially Xwiki but in their own terms: 'there was no support as mailing lists aren't considered support and nobody would understand how to work it'. This is a very typical misconception. It's not because some software is open source that there aren't companies doing support for it. Quite the opposite. Whereas with closed software you'll have only 1 company doing support, with open source you'll generally find several companies doing support for products… ;) You can point them to http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/Support#HProfessionalSupport (this link is available on xwiki.org in the top level horizontal menu under the Support tab) In the UK while job hunting I do express my knowledge in Xwiki to any company I come into contact with and again the response usually is 'We use Sharepoint in this firm'. Thanks for sharing the xwiki love around you! :) That's great. It's just unfortunate that I am not in a senior (or any) position here with a bunch of contacts in the same place as I definitely would try to get Xwiki on the map! I must sincerely appologies for this as I am a huge fan of Xwiki - bar the inability to upgrade versions currently but that's still a work in progress ;-) hehe… that's still one of the difficult points even though we're trying to improve… But if there's anything I can do to help the project I will in anyway I can! Thanks -Vincent Regards, Kaya ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi, Today I have noticed that XWiki made it into a commercial solution * http://www.cloudbees.com/platform-ecosystem.cb * http://www.marketwatch.com/story/cloudbees-adds-mongohq-papertrail-and-xwiki-to-integrated-partner-ecosystem-of-hosted-cloud-services-for-java-developers-2011-10-24 My congratulations! :) One more observation that XWiki is primarily presented in European counties on 2012.01.21 following request http://www.google.com/trends/?q=XWikictab=0geo=alldate=allsort=0 produced 1. Algeria 2. France 3. Morocco 4. Czech Republic 5. Switzerland 6. Belgium 7. Romania 8. Singapore 9. Austria 10. India I think it's essential to get other markets to increase the community (north America comes first to mind, however taking into consideration number of population - China, India and fast growing Latin America world that might depend) Regards, Roman -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p7209612.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi Sergiu! XWiki is great! This community is very integrative and friendly! *Use the Wiki!* - for making the documentation: PDF generating of up-to-date user handbook etc.. - for feedback. Use the Wiki, not a mailing list nor a forum software. Integrate everything in the Wiki. Thanks. I like the spirit of the community! Volker from Oslo, Norway -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p7098929.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
One more Idea to add here: * There definitely should be a demo movie recorded depicting the most appealing things in XWiki. A promo video. Rationale: I've been looking for an Agile management tool, and have come across this one http://www.clockingit.com/ it has great features, but the presentation is so awful that you will not really see them until you install the system. Which many users will not do. A user must fall in love (or lust at least) with suggested tool from the first site, enough to take the chance of installing it. For reference of what I mean under promo video, I'll name Google as one of the usual best promo-video makers - and its tools (gDocs, Circles, Wave and etc) -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p7095035.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Ok, sorry once more for animating the old thread. * http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/09/15.html = one way to advertise = get more users - the more users you get, the more developers there will be required to maintain installations - the greater chance of gaining new committers. -- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p7045990.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Sorry for animating this old thread, just wanted this to be in one place with the relevant rest. I've had an idea cross my mind today about promoting XWiki. It's hard to imagine more or less serious software project nowadays that could survive without: * Requirements tracking (Wiki) * Issue tracking [with agile tools] * Code Review * Continuous integration * Code metrics tracking * IDE integration (Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA) In non free-ware world the ultimate ruler is Atlassian set of products. In the open source world the niche is still not taken. Yes, there are tools like IceScrum (which btw as well originates from France), XWiki, Jenkins (former Hudson), Review Board (yet it's not on Java), Sonar. There are even integration attempts e.g. Trac (wiki+bug tracking+code review) But all those tools are either written on different platforms (which is a real maintenance pain) or are not integrated as good as Atlassian set of tools is. If an Alliance of open-source projects is to emerge one day to cover the gap described above, it would better be XWiki, responsible for the wiki and page rendering part in the integration. So what XWiki development community could do in this regard, is to take the initiative of establishing this Alliance and leading it towards integration with XWiki. Current visible set of tasks is * Create list of available JAVA (!) open-source project covering different aspects of the integration (e.g. Sonar is best in code metrics, Jenkins - in continuous integration etc.) * Contact the development teams of the above projects and negotiate the initiative * Analyze code-bases for integration opportunities Hope you'll find this interesting. Regards, Roman-- View this message in context: http://xwiki.475771.n2.nabble.com/State-of-the-XWiki-Community-tp5919692p6316760.html Sent from the XWiki- Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ___ users mailing list users@xwiki.org http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi Sergiu/everyone, See below. On Jan 13, 2011, at 9:53 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: Hi Community, The following message expresses my personal opinions as a member of the community, so it might not be entirely accurate. The goal is to start a discussion about how can we attract more contributors and committers to the XWiki open source project, and will address three main subjects: - the current state of the community and committers - the possibility of joining or creating a non-profit foundation to govern XWiki - the possibility of using Fundry as a way for users to fund XWiki development - Status of the community At the start of a new year, it's time to look a bit at the status of XWiki, the project and the community. XWiki was created by Ludovic Dubost as an open source project from the start. Later, he founded a commercial company (XWiki SAS, back then XPertNet SaRL) as a way to financially support the development of the product. It kept the project entirely open, unlike the many false open source companies that only offer a basic open source version, forcing people to buy the commercial one (the open core model), or that only release the source code while still doing behind-the-curtains development, or that almost completely ignore the outside community. See the XWiki SAS values: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-values and manifesto: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-manifesto The committers, elected for their merit, and not made automatically as employees of the company, always tried to maintain a healthy community and attract new contributors/committers. Thus, the XWiki software is developed not by the XWiki SAS company, but by the XWiki community. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/ has a lot of information about the community, and the development process. As of January 2011, there are 16 core committers, 12 of which are XWiki SAS employees, and 3 are or were related to XWiki SAS one way or another. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/HallOfFame#HCoreCommitters I've just updated this page and added an Affiliation column for increased transparency: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/HallOfFame A big part of the development is aided by non-committer members of the community, either by providing patches, testing and reporting bugs, requesting new features, providing feedback, answering on the mailing lists, etc. As committers, we tried to listen to the community when developing the project, but as paid employees we have to also listen to the company requirements. With a limited manpower it's very hard to evolve as fast as the community would want, or in all the directions that the community wants. And we welcome any help here. The project is healthy, we have regular and frequent releases, with visible progress with each new release (see Vincent's statistics on http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Blog/XWikiIn2010 for more details). Still, I'm a little disappointed with the development speed. Lately, out of the 16 committers on average about 3-4 are actually available for platform development during a day. * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? Find a way to sponsor more people? :) IMO the community is growing fast. I think you mean the development team (committership), right? * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? (Here's below a repost to an internal mail where we were discussing about whether the bar is too high or not to contribute to xwiki's development, with slight modifications) I think we need to separate 2 areas: * core contributions * extension contributions This is the same in all open source project (linux core, vs peripheral things). The level of quality asked is not the same for core contributions vs extension contributions or peripheral domains (non core). I doubt very much that the linux kernel accepts contributions that don't have a very good quality level for example. Same for Firefox or any other Mozilla project. In practice I don't think we can expect people external to XWiki SAS or more generally people not paid to work on XWiki for 2 reasons: 1) there are committers paid to work daily on them and as such they progress much faster than anyone outside could (since those person outside are not paid for that and don't have extensible time - they do it in their free time - it's almost impossible to follow code and discussions). 2) it requires a high quality level I'm always surprised and have a great admiration when people succeed in contributing to core things, like Sergiu in his time, Denis and Caleb. Also I think that most open source project have a very small number of people who are actually core committers (you can count them on one or 2 hands). When you see open source projects with tons of contributors they're actually contributing to peripheral things like: translations, themes, extensions, etc. What
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi Roman, Thanks a lot for your feedback. Lots of good points. It's also good to see that you like the way XWiki is being developed! :) At some point, we should put on a wiki page all the good ideas that emerged from this thread. Thanks -Vincent On Jan 19, 2011, at 3:15 PM, coldserenity wrote: Hi Sergiu, Thanks for the interesting story :) * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? Continue doing this brilliant work you do. And ... * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? ... here's a list of some ideas (might contain crazy ones) * First thing is to bring more users (see http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence ) among which new developers shall emerge * At many points XWiki is more powerful than Confluence, outline them * You have to populate the knowledge about XWiki to the Community * If you want to attract developers, advertize among developers * Advertize with features developers and development teams like * Probably advertize XWiki (sourceforge, apache, codehaus) through ads * Try to convince Apache (or at least projects within Apache you have close relations with), Codehaus etc. to host it's numerous docs on XWiki * XWiki functionality as a document storage is more than sufficient. Build more applications on top of it (e.g. agile tools, project management tools) to attract more users. (another e.g. we try to use XWiki for storing all the knowledge about our project, including meetings, user stories etc. It would be nice to bring in some agile features like meeting minutes, product backlog, integration with Jira) * Ability to build applications on top of XWiki is its main advantage you have to extend and advertise to a wide community. * If I owned a software development company I'd send my developers/managers/architects for internship on XWiki for 3-6 iteration cycles to learn all that cool things you do. Maybe I'm not the only one? Some concerns * Main XWiki competitor is Confluence * Unfortunately for XWiki, when one buys Jira - he's likely to buy Confluence * Now is the moment, of truth, XWiki either becomes popular, or vanishes in the fight with Confluence (which might start or already started receiving features from XWiki) * I really hope that XWiki.org will survive not to be either bought by or turn into a commercial company (like Compass and EHCache were somewhere in the past). It so demotivating for the open-source committer that someone has used his hard and volunteer work to get richer. Some major points from the story below * SearchEngineOptimization matters (http://www.google.com.ua/search?q=wiki+engine) * Project Homepage UI matters * Project UI matters (and currently its good, keep an eye on it ;) ) * Ease of installation matters * Ease of configuration / Hot configuration (ability to change smth without restarting the server) matters. And currently its the way you go (plugin management module) * Modularity / Extensibility (with numerous plug-ins) matter * Community (those who are able to support you) matter * Documentation / Tutorials matter (thanks for the numerous docs on how to setup and tune XWiki) * How easy you input your information matters (WYSIWYG + Document import rock!) * Healthy development process matters * Being heard by the community is nice * Frequent feature-fruitful releases are nice THE STORY BELOW Now I will tell you my story of getting addicted to XWiki. We required a wiki for our project and from all of the available choices we initially took FOS Wiki. However having an experience with Attassian Confluence, I neither liked the UI nor syntax. Being a Java developer (Tomcat/JBoss) I as well hated complex installation of that wiki itself as well as plug-ins for it. The structure of that wiki was hard to understand. Funny to mention but most of all I hated how it formats the Java code :) Soon after we started using FOS Wiki, having that heavy feeling of something isn't right I did a quick final random poke for other open-source frameworks (preferably Java, where I could develop the feature I miss or patch the bug I find). I must say that XWiki was far not the first one I found but ... I was conquered with sweet-as-a-candy design of XWiki site (Toucan Skin at that moment). So I quickly downloaded the installer, set it up on my local machine and started getting more and more astonished with the nice features XWiki provided. Just to name few * It had more logical (or at least more obvious) organization of documents * Eye-pleasing UI * Easy installation * A ton of plugins and extension * All was configurable and in many cases even from UI without the need to restart the server Hell, I was even capable to hack (patch) the code colorer library to use styles I wanted (later was added as config parameter)! * The syntax 2.0 was nice (again, thanks for the recent emoticons feature :) ) and the code
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
This is a interesting conversation. I have been thinking recently about what motivates people to contribute to free software projects. What I have come up with is this: 1. They need it to do _that_. 2. If they contribute code then their contribution will be maintained with the trunk (perhaps even improved), if they try to maintain a patch set in-house, they will be forced to make changes to it each time a new version comes out. IMO this is a big motivator for people to clean up their code and meet project standards. On 01/27/2011 08:46 AM, Vincent Massol wrote: Hi Sergiu/everyone, See below. On Jan 13, 2011, at 9:53 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote: Hi Community, The following message expresses my personal opinions as a member of the community, so it might not be entirely accurate. The goal is to start a discussion about how can we attract more contributors and committers to the XWiki open source project, and will address three main subjects: - the current state of the community and committers - the possibility of joining or creating a non-profit foundation to govern XWiki - the possibility of using Fundry as a way for users to fund XWiki development - Status of the community At the start of a new year, it's time to look a bit at the status of XWiki, the project and the community. XWiki was created by Ludovic Dubost as an open source project from the start. Later, he founded a commercial company (XWiki SAS, back then XPertNet SaRL) as a way to financially support the development of the product. It kept the project entirely open, unlike the many false open source companies that only offer a basic open source version, forcing people to buy the commercial one (the open core model), or that only release the source code while still doing behind-the-curtains development, or that almost completely ignore the outside community. See the XWiki SAS values: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-values and manifesto: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-manifesto The committers, elected for their merit, and not made automatically as employees of the company, always tried to maintain a healthy community and attract new contributors/committers. Thus, the XWiki software is developed not by the XWiki SAS company, but by the XWiki community. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/ has a lot of information about the community, and the development process. As of January 2011, there are 16 core committers, 12 of which are XWiki SAS employees, and 3 are or were related to XWiki SAS one way or another. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/HallOfFame#HCoreCommitters I've just updated this page and added an Affiliation column for increased transparency: http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/HallOfFame A big part of the development is aided by non-committer members of the community, either by providing patches, testing and reporting bugs, requesting new features, providing feedback, answering on the mailing lists, etc. As committers, we tried to listen to the community when developing the project, but as paid employees we have to also listen to the company requirements. With a limited manpower it's very hard to evolve as fast as the community would want, or in all the directions that the community wants. And we welcome any help here. The project is healthy, we have regular and frequent releases, with visible progress with each new release (see Vincent's statistics on http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Blog/XWikiIn2010 for more details). Still, I'm a little disappointed with the development speed. Lately, out of the 16 committers on average about 3-4 are actually available for platform development during a day. * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? Find a way to sponsor more people? :) IMO the community is growing fast. I think you mean the development team (committership), right? * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? (Here's below a repost to an internal mail where we were discussing about whether the bar is too high or not to contribute to xwiki's development, with slight modifications) I think we need to separate 2 areas: * core contributions * extension contributions This is the same in all open source project (linux core, vs peripheral things). The level of quality asked is not the same for core contributions vs extension contributions or peripheral domains (non core). I doubt very much that the linux kernel accepts contributions that don't have a very good quality level for example. Same for Firefox or any other Mozilla project. My understanding is Linux recklessly breaks old api at the internal/modular level. Given #2 (top), our tiptoeing through deprecation/migration processes may actually harm us by encouraging people to keep their modifications secret. In practice I don't think we can expect people external to XWiki SAS or more generally
Re: [xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi Sergiu, Thanks for the interesting story :) * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? Continue doing this brilliant work you do. And ... * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? ... here's a list of some ideas (might contain crazy ones) * First thing is to bring more users (see http://www.google.com/trends?q=xwiki%2C+foswiki%2C+twiki%2C+confluence ) among which new developers shall emerge * At many points XWiki is more powerful than Confluence, outline them * You have to populate the knowledge about XWiki to the Community * If you want to attract developers, advertize among developers * Advertize with features developers and development teams like * Probably advertize XWiki (sourceforge, apache, codehaus) through ads * Try to convince Apache (or at least projects within Apache you have close relations with), Codehaus etc. to host it's numerous docs on XWiki * XWiki functionality as a document storage is more than sufficient. Build more applications on top of it (e.g. agile tools, project management tools) to attract more users. (another e.g. we try to use XWiki for storing all the knowledge about our project, including meetings, user stories etc. It would be nice to bring in some agile features like meeting minutes, product backlog, integration with Jira) * Ability to build applications on top of XWiki is its main advantage you have to extend and advertise to a wide community. * If I owned a software development company I'd send my developers/managers/architects for internship on XWiki for 3-6 iteration cycles to learn all that cool things you do. Maybe I'm not the only one? Some concerns * Main XWiki competitor is Confluence * Unfortunately for XWiki, when one buys Jira - he's likely to buy Confluence * Now is the moment, of truth, XWiki either becomes popular, or vanishes in the fight with Confluence (which might start or already started receiving features from XWiki) * I really hope that XWiki.org will survive not to be either bought by or turn into a commercial company (like Compass and EHCache were somewhere in the past). It so demotivating for the open-source committer that someone has used his hard and volunteer work to get richer. Some major points from the story below * SearchEngineOptimization matters (http://www.google.com.ua/search?q=wiki+engine) * Project Homepage UI matters * Project UI matters (and currently its good, keep an eye on it ;) ) * Ease of installation matters * Ease of configuration / Hot configuration (ability to change smth without restarting the server) matters. And currently its the way you go (plugin management module) * Modularity / Extensibility (with numerous plug-ins) matter * Community (those who are able to support you) matter * Documentation / Tutorials matter (thanks for the numerous docs on how to setup and tune XWiki) * How easy you input your information matters (WYSIWYG + Document import rock!) * Healthy development process matters * Being heard by the community is nice * Frequent feature-fruitful releases are nice THE STORY BELOW Now I will tell you my story of getting addicted to XWiki. We required a wiki for our project and from all of the available choices we initially took FOS Wiki. However having an experience with Attassian Confluence, I neither liked the UI nor syntax. Being a Java developer (Tomcat/JBoss) I as well hated complex installation of that wiki itself as well as plug-ins for it. The structure of that wiki was hard to understand. Funny to mention but most of all I hated how it formats the Java code :) Soon after we started using FOS Wiki, having that heavy feeling of something isn't right I did a quick final random poke for other open-source frameworks (preferably Java, where I could develop the feature I miss or patch the bug I find). I must say that XWiki was far not the first one I found but ... I was conquered with sweet-as-a-candy design of XWiki site (Toucan Skin at that moment). So I quickly downloaded the installer, set it up on my local machine and started getting more and more astonished with the nice features XWiki provided. Just to name few * It had more logical (or at least more obvious) organization of documents * Eye-pleasing UI * Easy installation * A ton of plugins and extension * All was configurable and in many cases even from UI without the need to restart the server Hell, I was even capable to hack (patch) the code colorer library to use styles I wanted (later was added as config parameter)! * The syntax 2.0 was nice (again, thanks for the recent emoticons feature :) ) and the code from WYSIWYG editor came out clean and shining. * ... and logical addition is the Word documents import (no more download/edit/reupload attachments!!!) That was EXACTLY what I was looking for! And then I've learned programming abilities of XWiki which made me totally convinced that it's the most advanced open source wiki tool available.
[xwiki-users] State of the XWiki Community
Hi Community, The following message expresses my personal opinions as a member of the community, so it might not be entirely accurate. The goal is to start a discussion about how can we attract more contributors and committers to the XWiki open source project, and will address three main subjects: - the current state of the community and committers - the possibility of joining or creating a non-profit foundation to govern XWiki - the possibility of using Fundry as a way for users to fund XWiki development - Status of the community At the start of a new year, it's time to look a bit at the status of XWiki, the project and the community. XWiki was created by Ludovic Dubost as an open source project from the start. Later, he founded a commercial company (XWiki SAS, back then XPertNet SaRL) as a way to financially support the development of the product. It kept the project entirely open, unlike the many false open source companies that only offer a basic open source version, forcing people to buy the commercial one (the open core model), or that only release the source code while still doing behind-the-curtains development, or that almost completely ignore the outside community. See the XWiki SAS values: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-values and manifesto: http://purl.org/xwiki/sas-manifesto The committers, elected for their merit, and not made automatically as employees of the company, always tried to maintain a healthy community and attract new contributors/committers. Thus, the XWiki software is developed not by the XWiki SAS company, but by the XWiki community. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/ has a lot of information about the community, and the development process. As of January 2011, there are 16 core committers, 12 of which are XWiki SAS employees, and 3 are or were related to XWiki SAS one way or another. http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/HallOfFame#HCoreCommitters A big part of the development is aided by non-committer members of the community, either by providing patches, testing and reporting bugs, requesting new features, providing feedback, answering on the mailing lists, etc. As committers, we tried to listen to the community when developing the project, but as paid employees we have to also listen to the company requirements. With a limited manpower it's very hard to evolve as fast as the community would want, or in all the directions that the community wants. And we welcome any help here. The project is healthy, we have regular and frequent releases, with visible progress with each new release (see Vincent's statistics on http://massol.myxwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Blog/XWikiIn2010 for more details). Still, I'm a little disappointed with the development speed. Lately, out of the 16 committers on average about 3-4 are actually available for platform development during a day. * How can we help speed up the growth of the community? * How can we attract more developers outside XWiki SAS? - Joining/forming a free software foundation One possible reason while so few people are willing to become committers could be that XWiki SAS might appear to over-control the software, and a clear non-profit foundation on top of XWiki might make it more obvious that XWiki is a true open source project, and anybody is welcome to join. XWiki SAS is a member of the OW2 consortium http://ow2.org/ , and this membership also extends a bit to the XWiki project. OW2 used to host all our infrastructure, SVN, mailing lists, downloads... Currently only the official downloads linked from the main download page are hosted on OW2 servers, as we've gradually moved parts of the development infrastructure on servers provided by XWiki SAS. While OW2 is a great home for XWiki SAS, it's mostly a company consortium, not a software development foundation. The most development help coming from OW2 consists of research projects involving both OW2 and XWiki SAS, thus the OW2 membership doesn't bring much value when it comes to code. One option is to form an XWiki non-profit Foundation, which will govern all XWiki-related software development. The main disadvantage would be that there's a risk that it won't make any difference at all, while adding the burden of more paperwork. This is where your opinion comes into play, since there's no point in doing all the hard work if the community doesn't see a clear benefit in it. The Apache Foundation has the huge disadvantage that it requires a license change, but it's a very well known home for software development, with good visibility. The Software Freedom Conservancy has been getting a lot of press recently, since several high profile projects joined it. It's got a few top-notch projects under its hood, so XWiki would be among well known projects in there. A smaller, compatible alternative is Codehaus, but I'm not convinced they would make a difference with respect to our needs. Other foundations aren't
