24 Jan
2008
24 Jan
'08
10:13 a.m.
I think that this would be fine. We have used the free xwiki to support
a charitable research and information organisation in the coordination
of comments, discussions and formal responses to a number of government
and health-service proposals, and it has been very successfully used by
a collection of largely non-technical users with comparatively few
problems. That in itself says a lot about xwiki's usability. In fact,
now the senior members (mostly women aged 50-70+, who a few years ago
were having problems understanding how to use email) are now quite happy
to use xwiki once we set it up for them, and several of them would
really miss it as it has made a very obvious difference to how people
can interact and cooperate online.
As a charitable organisation, we have very little available
infrastructure, no office space, and our active members are spread over
the whole of the UK - this makes it very difficult for us to provide our
own hosted services such as a wiki. The free farm proposed should allow
us to continue to use this invaluable technology. I'd love to be able to
help support the farm, but at present we have far too much to do running
our own small company and putting several extra hours effort every day
into the charitable work. Maybe next year...
Tim
Vincent Massol wrote:
Hi everyone,
Some time back XWiki SAS, the company who started XWiki had a free
online farm on xwiki.com. This farm was closed for new projects a few
months ago after XWiki SAS realized it didn't have the manpower (or
finance) to support it in a professional way. XWiki SAS still has a
professional farm offering but it's not a free farm (see
http://www.xwiki.com/xwiki/bin/view/Services/#HHosting)
.
I'd like to discuss with you the idea of offering a free farm managed
by the xwiki community and under the xwiki.org umbrella. In essence it
means there would be 2 farms available:
* a paying one which is on xwiki.com, for professional needs
* a free one on xwiki.org for universities, individuals or anyone not
requiring guaranteed support/availability at all times
Here's how it would work:
* No support guarantee. All support done on the xwiki.org user mailing
list.
* No stability guarantee. We would always install the latest Platform/
XE/XEM version on it and it would serve as a stability test for the
xwiki development team. Obviously the community will always try to
make it as stable as possible but that's not guaranteed.
* There will be several members of the community who'll have admin
access on the farm.
* We will reduce admin tasks by offering a simple UI on the farm
itself (restart, see memory stats, see blocking requests, ban a wiki,
etc)
* It will be open to anyone. However the target users will be
technical people who can support themselves to some extent. We won't
control that but it'll be mentioned on the registration page.
XWiki SAS would pay for the machine, hosting and the initial
installation.
I have 2 questions for you:
1) As a user of it, would you be interested by such a farm? Do you
think it's interesting for the xwiki project to have such a free farm?
2) As a community member, would you be willing to help administer it/
support it? For this farm to work we need to find several members of
the xwiki community willing to help administer it. Here are the tasks
I can think of:
- work on the welcome page content for the farm
- work on the FAQ for the farm (like "what do I do if I've lost my
password", etc)
- help answer user questions on the list (this can and should be be
done by everyone)
Thanks
-Vincent, with 2 hats: community developer and CTO of XWiki SAS
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--
Tim Chippington Derrick
Chippington Derrick Consultants Ltd
Tel: 01276 508949
Mob: 07971 997948
http://www.chippingtonderrick.co.uk