TWiki Marketing Meeting, 25 Aug 2008

"TWiki, the open source wiki for the enterprise."

Logistics

• Place: IRC Server chat.freenode.net, channel #twiki_marketing
• Date & Time: 2008-08-25 19:00 GMT (Convert the start for your time zone)
• Action items: TWikiMarketing
• IRC log: TWikiMarketingMeeting2008x08x25.txt
• Previous/Next meeting: TWikiMarketingMeeting2008x08x11, TWikiMarketingMeeting2008x09x08

Attendees

• PeterThoeny (facilitator)
• VickiBrown
• MartinSeibert (taking notes)
• KennethLavrsen

1. Usability & Home Page Redesign

• Champions: ArthurClemens, CarloSchulz
• Co-Champion: PeterThoeny
• Supporting topics: TWikiOrgRenewalWorks2008ToDo, NewNavigationModelForTWikiDotOrg, WebPageAudience, WebPageAudienceSiteStructure, UsabilityIdeas

No news on homepage redesign so far.

2. Blogging

• Champions: VickiBrown
• Supporting topic: TWikiBlogAndNewsletter

No news on blogging so far.

3. TWiki Meet-ups

• Champion: ?
• Supporting topic: TWikiMeetUps

4. Merchandising

• Champion: WillNorris
• Supporting topic: TWikiMerchandise

5. TWiki.org Server

• Champion: PeterThoeny
• Supporting topic: NewTWikiOrgServer2008

PeterThoeny reported the following:

• finally good progress
• x86 is almost ready
• nas is now properly configured
• eta is sometimes this week
• to switch over
• this consumed quite some time on me, and will consume more time
• there is unfortunately a negative performance hit moving from 4.1.2 to 4.2.2 if you have 36K+ users
• all 36K users are initialized on each hit, even if you are a guest. Not very efficient.
• yes, it will be ready by the summit
• will work on it tonight, can give details tomorrow

6. Registered non-profit association for donations

MartinSeibert had the idea to register a non-profit association in Germany to collect funds for TWiki-programmers. An approval for this process from PeterThoeny is missing. If Peter agrees, MichaelDaum and MartinSeibert will prepare the process of registering the non-profit association. Maybe we could found in the course of the TWiki-Summit in Berlin.

The proposal for a German registered non-profit association simply comes from MichaelDaum and MartinSeibert being Germans. We will translate the needed and relevant documents in English also. An advantage is also, that a couple of other TWiki-Community-Members understand German also (PeterThoeny, SvenDowideit). Here are some documents (German), that describe the needed actions for registering the association: Wie gründet man einen Verein?, Spendenquittung Geldspende (Muster), Antrag auf Steuerbegünstigung wegen Gemeinnützigkeit (Muster), Satzung, Antrag auf Eintragung in das Vereinsregister

• PeterThoeny will not block the idea nor will he actively support it.
• Peter doubts, that the distribution of funds will be easy: "i am with kenneth, i am not convinced that the non-profit is the right thing to do (question how to distribute money for work already performed), but i do not want to block if you want to try it out. personally i think a system to coordinate work to be done and compensate accordingly would be better"
• MartinSeibert still believes in this concept for the distribution of funds.
• PeterThoeny will not be involved.
• The twiki trademark can be used under these conditions: establish a wiki-neutral non-profit (such as wikifund.org), establish fund raising for more than one wiki, use of twiki name is ok within this context.
• The exposure that Peter wants:
  • We can add a small donate button on twiki.org homepage and codev and plugins home.
  • May be also on support web where people go for support?
• Update: Afaik members of an e.V. (non profit association) are not allowed to receive money for working on projects if money distribution is the main goal of the organisation. This will lead to the loss of tax privileges. Btw: I doubt that a tax privilege is granted, if there is no charitable purpose for the e.V. -- OliverKrueger

7. Preparations for TWiki Summit in Berlin

• Internet access at Motorola: Martin Seibert will have a UMTS-Flatrate with his macbook. Can anybody create a WLAN-Access point from that?
• Update: I can bring a Linksys WTR54GS with me to setup a small WLAN AP. With a decent OS respectively a TCP stack with IP forwarding capabilities it should be possible to share the umts connection with others. -- OliverKrueger

8. Brainstorming for ideas

Action items

1. MartinSeibert: Create a proposal for German TWiki Marketing Website
2. MartinSeibert: Write a suggestion on how TWiki can cooperate with Search Engine Bots without lowering the server performance.
3. MartinSeibert: Come up with set of questions for the survey in Codev before performing it.
4. PeterThoeny: Reply to will's t-shirt proposal.
5. PeterThoeny: Ping Sun again to get new servers for faster twiki.org.
6. PeterThoeny: Comment on https://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiOrganization.
7. PeterThoeny: Write a section on TWikiCommunityCouncil.
8. PeterThoeny: Explain why there is a need for a registration on twiki.org. I do not want to change anything. But we have to give reasons why a registration is needed. (see this: Screenshot, Video).
9. VickiBrown: Investigate a pref setting for meta description and one for meta keywords in Blog web

Back to: TWikiMarketing

Discussion

Sorry, I did not make it to the meeting, so Im going to add my 2 cents here (above).

-- OliverKrueger - 25 Aug 2008

Oliver: I hope you will be able to configure the access point. That would be a good solution.

-- MartinSeibert - 26 Aug 2008

My concept for a fund-raising association is documented now. Please help with your comment: TWikiFundRaising

-- MartinSeibert - 31 Aug 2008