TWiki has been the core for our human resource management, knowledge management, and project management. The strength of TWiki is known in its ability to create wiki applications that’s suitable for the company. Unlike CMS or its alternatives, TWiki allows any users to quickly create applications that fit using a range of plugins and addons! The benefits of what TWiki can provide is widely known from large multinationals (e.g. IBM, Yahoo!) to startups like us.
While the product is fantastic, adopters may be uneased with the discrepancies within the people behind the TWiki project.
About two days ago, TWiki founder Peter Thoeny announced the relaunch of the TWiki project through the commercial entity TWiki.NET as the pillar of the free and open source software. On the surface, nothing is wrong with this type of management strategy. However, digging deeper into the community voices, Peter’s action was entirely unsupported for several reasons.
- Lack of proper and communal governance
- TWiki.NET’s absolute and commercially-driven authority over the TWiki project thereby introducing an unhealthy commercial ecosystem
- Lack of acknowledgement in TWiki’s foundation as a community-led project
As far back as 2003, the community have kindly voiced for better management over the TWiki project. Fast forward to 2008, the community at large has improved the situation with mature discussions on TWiki governance and strategies. The TWiki Community Summit in Berlin two months ago further strengthened the community’s dedication in continuing the success of TWiki.
However, the recent announcement on the relaunch of TWiki has put all these years of effort back to square one. Peter Thoeny and TWiki.NET will gain absolute control over TWiki without serious collaboration and consideration of the core community, including its core developers.
On Monday’s meeting, when the annoucement was made, TWiki’s Project Manager Kenneth Lavrsen boldly stated that he “personally cannot continue under these conditions”. Crawford Currie, a well-known core developer, also firmly stated, “tbh, after this action I have lost all the trust I had (slowly been rebuilding since the summit) in Peter.” All TWiki core developers have voiced similarly in the lost of faith in the TWiki project due to Peter’s action and have started a fork - NextWiki.
The turn of events in TWiki due to the lack of community involvement in top level decision making has finally settled in an ugly fiasco. The good side is, all core developers have moved on to NextWiki to create a better future.
More voices can be heard from the developers of TWiki…
