Organizing the TWiki-Community

Goals

• This document shall help to organize our efforts to build up a great TWiki.org-Community.
• We want to make it easy for community-members to contribute in an area of their strength.
• We want to give a good overview, of who is involved in what field. This way new community members can easily address the right people directly and can start with the right contributions faster.

Tasks and elements

• Perform survey with all community-members to get more insight about problems and needs to foster the community. (Next step: Create a new document and collect questions of all community members to the whole community. Define the steps for setting up the survey.)
• Create a matrix with regular efforts of community-members, where they can estimate their monthly capacitiy and their current workload at the moment. We want to get to know, who does what and who can support and who needs support. This should be transparent to all community members.
• Create basics for funding core programming work for TWiki. At first we need exposure for programmers. But additionally money will be very helpful also.
• Brainstorm for ideas to give the community more transparency and overview. Create ideas of how to ultimately increase trust in the community.
• Political and behavioral documents, that we need:
  • Preparations and procedures for a legitimate election of a TWiki-Community-Council (TCC).
  • Guideline for the behavior in discussions in Codev. The is too much flaming and emotional discussions at the moment. People tend to look in the past instead of focusing on designing the future of TWiki.org.
  • Strategy and discussion on treating commercial activities within twiki.org and define a distinct separation between everybody's personal interest and TWiki.org
  • We could create a table as an overview with all community members and a note about their personal / business interests in TWiki and their non-profit goals for TWiki.org. This would help to understand, where people want to go and what might be the bias, that might be inevitable in some situations.

Simple Actions, that help

• Revise the template for new documents and optimize it: incluce TOC, erase Contributor (prevents others from changing the core part and increases comments), ...
• We need much more rewards and exposure for programmers, that enhance the TWiki-Software. A statistic with the contributors of each release would be a good thing.

Next steps

• Wait for more input from community members.
• CarloSchulz, MichaelDaum and MartinSeibert have a personal "MeetUp" in Hamburg on 2008/07/16. They will discuss the issue also.

Discussion

From an IRC-Chat with PeterThoeny:
22:15 - peterthoeny - at first glance it looks like a deviation from the twikigovernance proposal
peterthoeny - there are some good parts, such as survey to understand interest and workload of community members

-- MartinSeibert - 11 Aug 2008