All about Community

Last week Peter, Jitendra and I walked around The O'Reilly Oscon 2009 Conference in San Jose, CA, and felt some of the energy of the many open source communities that were represented there. Being part of the Twiki community, it was great chatting with like minded folks in the Drupal, OpenSolaris and Ubuntu communities.

If that wasn't enough energy, we were invited to the launch party that night at E&O Trading Company for Open Source for America. As I wandered down the party sipping on my wine. meeting old friends and making new ones, it was amazing for me to hear again and again "Oh, TWiki, yeah I know you guys. My Mom works at the Dept of ... in the Government., and they use Twiki". Or "Yup, we use Twiki heavily at our ... Agency".

That got me thinking. How did we get there ? Why were we downloaded over 80,000 times in the last 12 months (no that's not a typo!). Why do some 50,000 visitors come to our community website every month? As the VP of Marketing at TWIKI.NET, could we attribute this to Marketing ? I wish. The credit lies with our community, and the strong commitment to an open source core that has made our development and our vision transparent to anyone and everyone.

The next day we went to the SourceForge Community Choice Awards party. We were there because of you, our community. Thank you. You nominated us to be a Finalist. We didn't leave with the prize this year, FireBird did. Congratulations! They have a great community. But I'm sure we had a strong showing. Our YouTube video had over 4500 hits in a month, and counting!

Thank you, TWiki community.

2009-07-31 | Milind Pansare | Category Community