I wasn’t able to travel from Sydney, Australia to Berlin for this summit – which means I’ve missed all 3 of them so far :(.
I was able to listen in on the conference calls made for the governance discussions, and was quite amazed at the strong commonality in the communities approaches and desires. I guess spending over 5 years talking over the same frustrations, and attempting solutions to them brings everyone on board extremely cohesively.
An amazing thing was that with Tom Barton (CEO) there, we heard from yet another TWIKI.NET decision maker that they were not aware of the feelings of the community – extremely scary for a startup that alleges to be working in the interests of the community.
Next major hurdle seems to be trademark control – Peter owns the ‘TWiki’ trademark, and TWIKI.NET wants to leverage that to gain an advantage in the TWiki community. It seems to me that the best response is for the community to avoid the issue – by doing what WireShark did when faced by a similar issues with the ‘Ethereal’ trademark – Rename and Re-brand the open source project.
There seems hope that things may not come to that – the second and final day saw the election of an Interm council to guide TWiki to a lasting democratic setup.
Either way, there is definitely cause to be optimistic about the project known as TWiki. Many thanks to Kenneth of Motorola for organising and hosting the Summit.
