Hello Team
As we get into the end of 2024 I figured I send this message out to express
Thank You for everyone's contributions. The year has been moving fast and I
know there are efforts to improve moin moin.
I wanted to take a minute and talk about the happiness it brought me, the
release of moin version 2.0 and how the attention of the developers before
was split between 1.x and 2.x and now we are finally onto one version
again. Each of them being active felt like diluting the power of our
community. Happy to hear that we may now focus our force of every
contribution towards one common goal version 2.0 and beyond.
On the topic of the evolution of wiki. Over years of my career I've learned
one thing, we love to write software, but we also need to pay attention to
what users want. In a typical for-profit organization this would translate
into a tool for decision making: "enable solutions that a customer is
willing to pay for". In our volunteer work we need to embrace one part of
this decision making process i.e. our need to understand the direction of
what users want. The wikis way have evolved, and I want to discuss a few
topics that come to mind when it comes to evolution of what was and what
is. This evolution is seen across the whole wiki-like software category.
Evolution of git. Recently moin has moved some of its documentation to
github, and while reviewing documentation I found that editing the page,
logging in with github, having my change being reviewed by admin, and
accepted within 24h, and pushed to prod was powerful. Felt my contribution
was recognized and felt the power of git controlling the change. I think
there is a power of using git as the engine of commits. I think it could
allow possible decomposition of elements and greater diversity of
implementations assuming it can scale to wiki type # of commits. The git
system has been tested for years and has taken over how anyone works
together. There is a great amount of tooling and understanding of its
processes and we could take advantage of it inside the wiki process.
Evolution in private and public. I find that the solutions are similar yet
applied differently and there can be activities that can allow synergy
between the two. One solves a problem for the other and the other solves a
problem for first. Both feeding each other and expanding the reach. Before
I proceed I wanted to express that I feel the focus is a key, and I think
the focus for our development community would be to increase our user base
at the cost of our pride as being one holistic solution. I don't say that
lightly, It took some amount of time to realize that.
Evolution in private and public continued
Login with (google, apple, AD, microsoft, github, twitter, linkedin) so
many solutions I wish I was able to say I'm able to login my debian.org or
linux.org account or some other open source entity that has my identity
,profile, my public encryption key but I'm not sure I find one that is not
sponsored by a for profit corporation. A key lesson we need to pay
attention to is the fact that for profit companies that provide this
service they could allow us to increase our userabase. One key area I can
see our growth is within a corporation (from small business you might be
running <5 employees * million of them OR companies with 100 employees *
hundreds of thousands of them. I think we have the potential to gain a
large market share of users who not only develop but also use the knowledge
provided on their wikis. Maybe it's specific to that group.
Embedding forms, sheets, dashboards or other. There are so many things you
can share posts of, whether sharing your twitter post, your facebook
marketplace, your linked in profile, sharing has become a key idea of
spreading the message. Finding the most simplistic way to share is a
challenge I leave with you. Looking forward to your ideas on how users can
share each article/contribution or page in general with others.
Community joining in social. This has developed into its own thing, right?
How many of you are following someone, liking tweets, joining discord,
slack channels to engage with others. I think building a community around
an area /group / page would bring a large volume of users. What this really
allows one to do is exposing your ideas/creativity in wiki, and having 100x
of others either join you on your journey by joining the page as
subscriber, or maybe a contributor, or maybe viewers or commenter. There
are many different ways to contribute, and solving a challenge of making it
easy for other people to join the page and start engaging can only be
solved by the open source community; a place where each of our ideas can be
mixed and remixed into amazing solutions.
Push notifications - I think our version 1 of a built in feature called
'change notification' was a great beginning, but this has evolved into
people receiving notifications in various formats, channels, and frequency.
>From being notified of every change, to being notified of a new page, new
post, new comment, or when someone pings me. Why limit myself? If I already
said I want to engage with the page, then bring the news to me in whatever
channel I want it to. That is the evolution of push notifications. Is
getting notified on my phone from all the social media unhealthy, yes, but
I have no problem muting all of them except for phone calls, sms, and this
one important wiki page :). I really care about it so let's give users the
ability to engage and get notified.
Routing and functions
With every healthy group (your class, your family, a group you get paid to
support, a volunteer group, your favorite crossfit class, etc), there is a
directory, there is contact us, report issues, helpdesk, learning, how to
contribute, all these are "functional pages that allow some action to
happen. Could this routing function page be subscribing me, or maybe
signing me up to the next user group meeting that will be held in 2 weeks
and adding me to meeting invite, or maybe learning will notify me of a
change of specific thing on a page, or I have a question related to content
on the page. All sorts of requests going back and forth could be solved by
these helper function pages. Can I get a badge for that, or a token for
doing the contribution work. How can we incorporate the "function-do" into
our everyday wiki usage?
As with any software, plugins allow the ecosystem to grow. From stores with
apps, to plugins, themes free and paid, to plugins that solve seo
challenges, to plugins that allow forms submissions ,payments, shipping
,etc. Finding a way to allow plugins enablement could lead to a lot of
success for our project. I think building infrastructure to enable it, and
exposing the api in documentation that is easily consumed and developed on,
could speed up the adaptation growth and again provide synergy in our user
growth and community ecosystem that supports it.
That is the evolution I wanted to speak to you about today. I hope this
message finds you well and my intent is that it's mutually beneficial for
everyone's side. I wanted to emphasize a key point, focusing our efforts is
a key, I would rather see all developers of all wikis come together in
implementing changes that users want, then seeing everyone reinvent the
same existing feature in a new function. We need to evolve, as new younger
developers are joining we need to shine a light on the issues worth
pursuing. We need them to work on things users want them to resolve. We
need to give them guidance on how to do and accomplish it, give ourselves
and others support and badges for doing the work. We can't do it ourselves
but we can do it together. That's the beauty of true open source. We get to
solve problems that no one else can. I look forward to your contribution in
the next 90 days and the whole 2025.
Thank you
--
Lucas Szybalski
