Peter as community lead: As the TWikiCommunity is growing bigger and the TWiki project is getting more established it makes sense to create a TWiki foundation, or some kind of other non-profit body or project to help support a vibrant open source community, at some point. I think the community should drive this. We can take this as one of the agenda items in the upcoming TWikiCommunitySummit2008Q1 in mid Februray in the Silicon Valley. Many of potential financial contributors may be in the USA, and we may get more contributions by larger companies if we form a 501(c) non-profit organization that is exempt from income taxes.

Peter with TWIKI.NET hat on: TWIKI.NET is already getting expensive hardware for twiki.org through Sun, and is on the way to pay for twiki.org hosting. The company is also driving more awareness to the TWiki project (and more business to consultants). The company has invested in educating industry analysts; TWiki is now reported as a leader in the collaboration space as a result, which helps draw more resources to the community. A TWiki foundation or dot.org of some sort could help bring more transparency to vital contributions beyond the important efforts of coding.

A question for all of us to consider before meeting at the TWiki Community Summit is which open source community would we most like to model our efforts on? MySQL? Linux? Apache? Others? There are many possible different models. Which makes the most sense given the nature of TWiki as a wiki and collaboration platform for Enterprise 2.0? How might we be similar to other open source projects, and how might we be different? How can we best nurture a great community which is rich, diverse, active and contributes great technology to the millions of TWiki users around the world?

These are some of the questions we might consider. I am looking forward to the conversation.