New Leadership Supporting Community

Dear TWiki open source community:

If you google the news on "twiki" you will see a lot of press coverage today.

Rod Beckstrom accepted a high level position within the US government. He was appointed to run the newly created National Cyber Security Center, which will operate within the Department of Homeland Security. I can't express in words how much I appreciate Rod's engagement with the company and with the community. A true leader.

I am thrilled to announce that we appointed Tom Barton as the new Chairman and interim CEO of TWIKI.NET. He is very much execution focused and has an excellent track record in developing vibrant open source communities. Tom was the Interim CEO of Cygnus Solutions, which was acquired by Red Hat Software in 1999. At Red Hat, he continued as Senior VP of Client Services. More recently, he was CEO at Rackable Systems, the company he made public.

Tom asked me to convey this message to the community:

I am very excited about joining TWIKI.NET and the TWiki community more broadly. We used TWiki extensively at my last company - Rackable Systems - and I saw the difference it made in our efficiency by improving departmental and cross functional collaboration, not just as a tool use by engineers to manage projects. TWiki was used throughout the organization. It virtually replaced our traditional IT managed intranet. For example, our TWiki based intranet contained all HR information, our quality system, manufacturing instructions and other business critical information.

My experience was that the software is extremely reliable. In the 4 years I was with the company, the only time the server failed was due to a hardware fault, so obviously the team has done some excellent coding. It is clearly the best enterprise wiki out there and has the most active and vibrant open source community. I am committed to making TWiki.org a success as much as I am committed to making TWIKI.NET a success. When I was at Cygnus Solutions, we had a very positive relationships with the GNU project, and through our efforts as a commercial company, we were able to fund a substantial portion of the development of core technologies like gcc, gdb, and glibc. I hope to help do the same with TWiki.

I asked Tom to participate in our upcoming open source release meeting on 31 Mar 2008. He can't participate this coming Monday since he will be out of the office all next week.

With Tom on board we will continue with the mission I stated last year on twiki.org. I believe TWIKI.NET executed well so far along the commitments:

  • Fund enhancements to open source project via consultants (editors, skins)
  • Organize and sponsor TWiki Community Summits (including Larry Wall)
  • Organize and sponsor TWiki Meet-ups
  • Secured expensive Sun hardware for twiki.org
  • Fund half a rack of hosting for twiki.org
  • Help publicize TWiki (such as TWiki's position in Gartner's magic quadrant)
  • Initiated TWiki merchandise (T-shirts)
  • Refer consulting work to consultants

Please let me know if you have suggestions on how TWIKI.NET can bring more value to the TWiki community in a most effective way. Please provide feedback on the TWIKI.NET page on TWiki.org.

pencil 008-03-20 | Peter Thoeny | Category Community

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