SWOT

SWOT Analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture. It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving that objective. Source: SWOT analysis on Wikipedia Where is TikiWiki headed? Please see: Goals Goals of this page: A community-managed S.W.O.T. for the TikiWiki community A lightweight participative strategic planning tool Dogfood the use of TikiWiki for this purpose (SWOT analysis the wiki way!) Two additional sections "Recommended actions" and "Related links" have been added. This page will be in constant flux and will evolve as things get done, and as opportunities/threats arise. Let's keep this for high-level big picture stuff. Bug reports and feature requests should stay on dev.tikiwiki.org This could evolve into better risk analysis, gap analysis and mindmap tools in TikiWiki.

Rating System
A	Excellent	These are our strengths. Let's make sure it stays that way.
B	Very Good	Things are generally under control
C	Good	Could be better, but no immediate problem
D	Poor	Needs some TLC
E	Fail	OMG there is something terribly wrong here! Someone should do something about it. How about you?

Reality check: As a volunteer organization, just adding something as a high-priority doesn't magically make it get done. It is useful nonetheless for:

• The community to have a global vision.
• People evaluating TikiWiki as a project & community to know what to expect
• For new people to see where help is most needed
• Ratings are a combination of importance vs difficulty which give us a very subjective Priority
  • Think "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link."
  • Something could be easy to fix and will be high priority even if it's not the most important (quick wins, low-hanging fruit)
  • Something could be very important, but the solution is not obvious.
  • Some things will help several things and should be done first. (bottlenecks)
  • Some things take a long time to produce results and thus, should be started early.
  • This is sometimes compared to other Open Source applications, sometimes a judgment on our evolution
  • We'll sort by the worst things (E to A) at the top to remind us that someone (you? ) should do something about it
  • The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
  • We can and must choose to see the glass as half-full. However, we must be realistic about the situation so we can improve.

Table of contents

• First impression / New users / Ease of installation (D)
• Look & Feel / Themability / User interface / Usability / Ease-of-use (C)
• Promotion / Marketing / Public Relations (D)
• Migration to TikiWiki (D)
• Working groups / Special interest groups / local user groups / p2p leadership (D)
• SaaS / Hosted solutions / WikiFarm? (D)
• Integration of new contributors to the community (D)
• Dashboard / Stats / Metrics / Key Performance Indicators (KPI) (C)
• Licensing / Legal (C)
• Extensibility / Expandability / Mashups / Integration with 3rd party apps & code reuse (C)
• Relations with the outside World / Standards / participation to events (C)
• Money and Fundraising (C)
• Releases and packaging (C)
• Sites & infrastructure (C)
• Customizability / Hackability (B)
• Performance / Scalability / Server load (C)
• Security (B)
• Commercial support options / Paid support / Commercial opportunities (B)
• Total cost of ownership (TCO) (B)
• Decisional structure / Governance / Guidelines / Rules / Strategic planning (B)
• Documentation (B)
• Install base / Adoption (B)
• Long term sustainability / Future-proofness / Lock-in protection (B)
• i18n / translations (A)
• Components / Platform independence / Code infrastructure / Architecture (B)
• Upgradeability (A)
• Community / Volunteers / Free support (A)
• Features / Development / Stability (A)
• Eating our own Dogfood (A)

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First impression / New users / Ease of installation (D)

Once marketing worked and people do indeed decide to try it out.

Strengths Tiki has arguably more built-in (out-of-the-box) features than any other Web application so users that are looking for lots of features will be attracted. 3.x installer and general User Interface is much better than 2.x which itself much better than 1.9.x	Weaknesses For years, the TikiWiki community has been very "developer-focused" Clutter. Tiki has tons of features but it's too long/difficult to get started. "Obscure" features complicate implementation for would-be admins. 6000 to 10000 downloads per month, yet many give up because there are too many features and it's difficult to setup
Opportunities By leveraging all the features with better profiles, the community would grow faster. It would make it easier to have custom distribution-like profiles and cater to vertical markets without causing issues.	Threats Lack of adoption Bad reputation Without growth/recruitment, normal (natural) turn-over of volunteers will hinder Tiki development.
Recommended action Improve install script Done in 3.0 Continue to promote initiatives such as TikiWiki for Smarties Enhance the profile manager and generate a profile for each of the most important Use Cases and encourage sub-communities around specialties / verticals Started for 3.0 Continue work on the magic admin panel. Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure. Instead, admin panels have been re-organized manually in 3.0 Nicer themes Done for 3.0 This aspect is hindered by disorganization on *.tikiwiki.org sites	Related links See a comparison of Tiki's installation process with Drupal and Joomla!

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Look & Feel / Themability / User interface / Usability / Ease-of-use (C)

Strengths Tiki is very themeable. Themes.tikiwiki.org has good content and permits to test all themes with most features.	Weaknesses Default themes are not as nice as other leading projects. No commercial themes available With all the features, some lack polish & focus Themes.tikiwiki.org is confusing (demo site vs doc site to install/create theme) There is still some inline css style which is hard to deal for designers. There are too much (but decreasing) tables used for presentation purposes. The CSS structure of all the grids is not enough standardized. There are no guidelines for developers about which styles they have to use in which part of the pages. So, they use what they can or try to see in some other grids what is generally used. This is a main problem for newcomers. The community should deploy some efforts to deploy factorized tools (like smarty plugins) which leaves less initiative to coders when they have to choose a structure. Such plugins are well suited to the community which is very open to (quite) anyone. Once we will have less bugs (we are not that far away), will come time to talk about ergonomy. There is A big big work to do. Our target has to be "one guy who knows nothing from wiki, web, etc... has to understand what he can do and what he has to do to achieve his work (change a wiki page, post in the forum...)". Today we are far away from this.... Developpers are, usually, not good in look and feel or ergonomy ! They often consider that the work is done when the functions are running and the buttons are working. Having a good look and feel is just another work.
Opportunities With a little work, Tiki could be sexy.	Threats People will use Wordpress or similar because there are hundreds of nice themes.
Recommended action Setup a theme/UI squad Gary, luci, Patrick, ricks99, etc. are doing a great job EditUIRevamp Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0 AdminUIRevamp Much better in 3.0 More user & centric design Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0 Would it be possible to write a script to batch convert Joomla! or Wordpress themes to Tiki? Maybe a script could do most of the job, finished by a designer. For themes.tikiwiki.org to be less of a theme testing place and more of a I-want-to-download-and-install type of place. demo.tikiwiki.org could be used to test themes. http://UI.tikiwiki.org project Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0	Related links

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Promotion / Marketing / Public Relations (D)

Strengths Not yet a strength but progress: http://info.tikiwiki.org is now much better than http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php was	Weaknesses 2.0 was released without a good list of new features and "why upgrade" Tiki marketing is pretty bad. When do you do a bit of everything, it's tricky to get a message across http://Tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php is confusing (Nobody actively in charge) TikiWiki is too low on the 2008 Open Source CMS Market Share Survey. From a marketing perspective, TikiWiki fell off the top-x charts here Google trends TikiWiki and 1st tier CMS players TikiWiki and 2nd tier CMS players TikiWiki and open source wiki engines TikiWiki and enterprise wiki engines Google insight TikiWiki and 1st tier CMS players TikiWiki and 2nd tier CMS players TikiWiki and open source wiki engines TikiWiki and enterprise wiki engines
Opportunities Getting lots of new, outside energies into Tiki.	Threats Perception of being "good" at many things, "excellent" at none. People will use a collection of single focus apps to solve their needs instead of TikiWiki. This is preventing a lot of new users & developers to join Tiki. Without growth/recruitment, normal (natural) turn-over of volunteers will hinder Tiki development. CMS Landscape is led by 3 major players and there are a bunch of specialized players. If Tiki doesn't maintain "mindshare", it could not be getting a steady stream of new energy to sustain and grow.
Recommended action TikiFestMontrealNov2008 Done, but still need to do a lot of follow-ups More TikiWikiTV Setup a Promo Squad (handling press/incoming mail) Preparing Case studies. Regis Barondeau will take the lead showcase professionally deployed sites, like CGCOM once we have enough nice case studies, do a 30sec. video of the best of TikiWiki Contact blogs & online media to have Tiki Reviews and Interviews? TwoRevamp Wiki Landscape Make sure to stay at the top of the list (after the big 3) for activity level / mindshare / community size /etc of the CMS Landscape. Prepare TikiWiki vs Drupal pages for all the major ones. Google says: "2. It's best to do one thing really, really well." but what if what you're really good at is to do lots of things? (A good all-round, well integrated tool?). http://info.tikiwiki.org/Fact+Sheet Define USP WhoWhat with pictures & bios Nobody ever got fired for picking MediaWiki Make a community version of http://marclaporte.com/TikiSucks to better explain the advantages of our model Develop a logo usage and brand guide like Joomla! Make a 2 min. promo slideshow about Tiki on Slideshare and each of us add it to our websites, LinkedIn? page, blogs, etc... Around the 3.0 release, start a design/marketing contest for new identity (logo, branding, etc.)	Related links http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#marketing

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Migration to TikiWiki (D)

Strengths TikiWiki has all the features so people will rarely have to give up on features if they choose to migrate	Weaknesses Little availability or easy migration scripts
Opportunities Most wikis are wikis only and most CMSs lack robust wiki functionality To attract talent & energy to TikiWiki of people who love the wiki way but want/need more features. 2009 Google Summer of Code project!	Threats Migration scripts tend to be fragile as developers only use them once.
Recommended action Look into easing migration from specialized popular applications who do not intend to become full-featured systems (ex.: MediaWiki). MediaWiki: support some of the syntax and improve import script. 2009-03-23: marclaporte received a recipe (php+perl scripts) which needs to be published	Related links

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Working groups / Special interest groups / local user groups / p2p leadership (D)

Strengths Tiki as an app has pretty much all the features to support this	Weaknesses Too few functional groups
Opportunities Growth Easier integration of newcomers DogFood for Social Networking	Threats Without groups, the organization can't scale
Recommended action Assign more & more responsibilities to contributors and improve that page with pictures & bios Promote working groups by dogfooding workspaces Establish groundwork for emergence of local user groups like Drupal in collaboration with maps.tikiwiki.org Promote TikiFests and local Tiki user groups	Related links http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar_number http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/07/10-rules-that-govern-groups.php

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SaaS / Hosted solutions / WikiFarm? (D)

Strengths Good for server farms, because people can customize a lot with same code base.	Weaknesses No one is offering dedicated TikiWiki hosting at the moment.
Opportunities Improved code (SaaS will upstream bugfixes) A wiki farm would help Tiki get more known DekiWiki: wik.is Drupal: Bryght TRIM is coming along nicely	Threats Hosting company tries and fails (hosting business is difficult) leaving customers high & dry.
Recommended action Encourage emergence of such service providers, which could specialize, such as EventSoup Continue work on TRIM and MultiTiki as tools for WikiFarms Apply for Apply for SourceForge hosted Apps Experiment with EC2	Related links Software as a service (Saas)

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Integration of new contributors to the community (D)

Strengths It's a friendly place Easy to get commit access: How to get commit access	Weaknesses Learning curve will scare many away Not clear how to get involved, who to talk to All in one design makes it more challenging to start contributing. External modules in other apps can be very simple and easy to learn from, without bothering with big picture (at first, anyways)
Opportunities Rick's blog is an "attempt to combat the Tribal Knowledge Syndrome that too often plagues software development projects"	Threats Not having fresh energies could lead to staleness.
Recommended action Better documentation and examples. Plugins and modules are great to learn from. Shoutbox is a good example as well. More groups Mentorship program Better promotion of IRC & Mailing Lists Matthew will take the lead on this	Related links

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Dashboard / Stats / Metrics / Key Performance Indicators (KPI) (C)

Strengths TikiWiki has many indicators which are quite high Activity Stats are high	Weaknesses There is no tracking/alerts. If the number of committers/sites/contributors/etc increases or decreases Data is fuzzy. Ex.: Number of active contributors: how do you define "active"? Marketing Stats are low and only growing slowly
Opportunities DogFood a new feature in Tiki.	Threats Not having good data to work with or spending too much time collecting
Recommended action optional reporting of anonymized usage stats & patterns (which features are used, how many accounts, etc) Dogfood DashBoard	Related links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_performance_indicators

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Licensing / Legal (C)

Strengths Tiki uses LGPL, which is a Standard OSI license	Weaknesses Not able to re-use GPL code. Tiki gathers many third-party components such as images, fonts and libraries. There is no systematic tracking of component licenses.
Opportunities mods.tikiwiki.org is a great way to help with GPL code A clear licensing status of Tiki (and its components) would allow redistribution of Tiki by operating system vendors such as Debian. Some will prefer LGPL	Threats
Recommended action Getting in contact with people like http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ and http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ to get preventive assistance. Check source code for licenses with http://fossology.org/	Related links

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Extensibility / Expandability / Mashups / Integration with 3rd party apps & code reuse (C)

Strengths All features are in Tiki. Very little need for external apps. Easy to join the project and to contribute: How to get commit access A vast number of interactions are already supported (ex.: OpenID)	Weaknesses It's not as easy as it should to add Tiki to the mix of an existing mosaic. Tiki doesn't have those "reflexes" Lacking several enterprise-type interactions like Outlook connector, etc Contributing modules for services that don't belong in the core is quite difficult
Opportunities Tiki data & code structure is pretty stable/mature now, so developing APIs now will ensure that they are fairly stable. Some developers want APIs, and maybe we'd get more traction. Ex.: plugin with Salesforce, etc Interactions such as mashups are often low hanging-fruit OpenSocial, www.dataportability.org and other such initiatives mods.tikiwiki.org is a great way to have additional code which is very specific (but needs improvement) Webservices in 3.0	Threats Making Tiki more 3rd party feature friendly could make the code more complex. (ex.: to be able to drop in phpBB instead of Tiki forums) [Adding migration tools for 3rd party apps like phpBB would bring more users, as would making it 3rd party friendly for less main-stream apps that would fit in modules]
Recommended action Add more support for various: interactions Invest time in WebservicePlugin Revamp module framework TKM Proposed Framework: Modules	Related links

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Relations with the outside World / Standards / participation to events (C)

Strengths Tiki already supports a large number of standards via various interactions Participation to WikiSym? 2007, 2008 and planned in 2009 Collaboration with Firefox community via support.mozilla.com	Weaknesses Tiki is not good enough at marketing and needs to be more outward facing, and in contact with various actors of the Open Source World.
Opportunities Participating to more standards. More synergy Unexpected opportunities	Threats Lost opportunities & isolation
Recommended action We should apply again in 2009 for Google Summer of Code. Accepted!! 4 projects! Be more active in standards and associations, such as OSCOM http://www.advogato.org/article/544.html http://www.advogato.org/article/657.html Add more support for various: interactions Participate to upcoming events TikiWiki community members should keep/improve contacts with WikiSym (Using TikiWiki for WikiSym2009) Oscom WikiMatrix OpenSourceCMS SourceForge Apply for SourceForge hosted Apps OSL Fossology Etc And all project of the Wiki Landscape and CMS Landscape Presence on Social Networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn?, etc Encourage presence of firms like Citadel Rock at events like Web 2.0 Expo Invite some of our clients to Tikifest to get their feedback, give them demos, get them involved, gave them a taste of the future, etc...	Related links

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Money and Fundraising (C)

Strengths Currently, Tiki manages no money, and has no bank account. This is a strength or a weakness, depending who you ask.	Weaknesses Currently, Tiki manages no money, and has no bank account. This is a strength or a weakness, depending who you ask.
Opportunities To get more resources in Tiki. We could get outside funding for Tiki but we need a bank account for this. Improve Tiki by DogFooding some new accounting features. Get funding to pay for Travel Expenses for TikiFests. Ex.: A yearly TikiFest for top 20-30 active contributors. Source of revenue: Ads, deals with hosts, love money, charity funding.	Threats Getting into political & ideological debates. Jealousy about where the money is allocated Becoming a target for lawsuits
Recommended action Short term: Continue the informal way, where people donate directly to active contributors and make a list of Potential funders Medium term: Have appropriate discussions about how to best get money, invest it, etc. Transparency, governance, etc And proceed with best solution, presumably to set up a foundation? to handle this. Do not engage in unsustainable spending Add recurring revenue generating code in the application (optional of course). It would be a way for Tiki admins to help Tiki at no direct cost to them. It could be google adsense type ads visible to Everyone/Admins or no one. Viral TikiWiki	Related links http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#money

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Releases and packaging (C)

Strengths All in one package makes it simple	Weaknesses Much too long cycles between 1.9 and 2.0 releases TikiWiki is no longer included in distros such as Debian
Opportunities More promotion by frequent releases	Threats People get discouraged because the feature they coded a long time ago in 1.10 is not yet in stable release. Other applications have wanted features in stable release.
Recommended action Release early, release often. New 6-month release RoadMap Find a volunteer for Packaging	Related links

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Sites & infrastructure (C)

Strengths Current *.tikiwiki.org are split amongst several community members Monitoring with Avonsys TikiWiki has all the feature-set we could want and it's great DogFood dogfood is great long term strategy	Weaknesses Not ready to scale to higher volumes, already doc.tw.o and dev.tw.o are straining current server Lack of some tools like http://www.statsvn.org/ Lack of a dedicated team assigned to this aspect. Not all sites are kept to latest version. dogfood can taste bad in the short term
Opportunities Greater synergy with Open Source community by collaboration with organizations like Open Source Lab	Threats Disappointing new people as load increases
Recommended action Look into: http://osuosl.org/hosting/services Move all site management to TRIM	Related links http://docs.joomla.org/Sites_and_Infrastructure_Working_Group

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Customizability / Hackability (B)

Strengths Tiki has hundreds of optional features built-in so you can customize without changing the code. And upgrades are painless. If you do need to change things, you can do quite a bit with the Smarty Template engine, which permits basic programming logic. Tiki uses simple code and a simple database structure. It is vast but each part is simple. All the data is in a database, for easy re-use. Easy to contribute	Weaknesses It's so vast that there is a learning curve. Because of alternate code model (wiki way, all-in-one), people don't always get it right away
Opportunities	Threats Code changes that will make Tiki less hackable
Recommended action Improve Hello World	Related links

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Performance / Scalability / Server load (C)

Strengths I can personally attest that each new version of Tiki has gotten faster. 1.9 is clearly faster than 1.8, which is clearly faster than 1.7 ( I don't remember before that). Some indexes were added and some optimizations were done as bottlenecks were reached. Reality: we have no metrics to compare Tiki performance to other similar applications (Drupal, Mambo, etc).	Weaknesses TikiWiki has a really bad reputation for performance because, for the longest time, tikiwiki.org was hosted on a personal server. This server was underpowered and overloaded. Ever since Oliver Hertel took over tikiwiki.org on a vserver from server4you.de, it has been zippy. I moved this to a C but only barely because I think there have been improvements on performance, but Trackers are a concern, especially with new features planned to use it in an integrated fasion (CRM); the more load we put on the tracker without addressing it, I think will uncover some potential pitfalls On the Scalability point, I think that Tiki has a great potential for it, but currently with the state of the code, without a refactor and in some cases a rewrite for efficiency and perhaps even some modularization, scalability is possible, but should be treated with kid gloves as we add more stuff for the core to deal with Reality: we have no metrics to compare Tiki performance to other similar applications (Drupal, Mambo, etc).
Opportunities Mozilla support project will be has been very helpful.	Threats I read in the mailing list or on IRC someone saying the counter is wrong (and presumably has been wrong for a long time). Something about counting queries more than one, even though they are really only done once. I don't know if it's true. But if it is, it is scaring people away for nothing.
Recommended action Get someone in charge to get metrics and then, ask marketing to explain the situation, good or bad. It is ok to say "Tiki has way more features, but it's a bit slower". Continue work on Performance Friendly challenge to our friends in other Open Source CMS and Wikis for a speed test / stress test challenge. This would be a great topic for a www.codefest.ws and collaborate on these aspects.	Related links

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Security (B)

Strengths Good track record at fixing reported important security vulnerabilities. All-in-one model makes it easy to test & duplicate security reports. (everyone has same features) Whereas 3rd party module model can make it tricky to check/test security or compatibility between two 3rd party modules. In recent versions of TikiWiki, a security audit was done and we made sure that all .php files had a feature check and unless the feature is activated, the file does nothing, and can't be a risk. (So only activated features can be a risk). A security script is part of the release procedure and detects potentially unsafe files. Clearly identified members of the Security Squad A dedicated security resource: http://security.tikiwiki.org TikiWiki is inherently pretty secure because it strips all javascript and doesn't interpret html. You can give html permission to a group however.	Weaknesses Users do not upgrade their TikiWiki No formal guidelines on what is a security problem, so path disclosure bugs, while minor, are not systematically treated. No systematic security audits. All-in-one model makes for a security issue in a little used feature could still affect all Tiki installs. This is now solved by systematic feature check in all files. Security team needs new fresh blood. Tiki is so massive, that it's a lot of work to release new versions. Not enough brainpower to maintain more than 2 BRANCHES. So we can't have a stable + security branch. We just have stable, which includes bug fixes and security fixes: Where to commit
Opportunities By being more proactive, we'll avoid the annoyance of rush security releases.	Threats Bad reputation because of security issues Community members & TikiWiki users getting compromised
Recommended action Since security is such a vast subject, identify some leaders for various aspects. Put the finishing touches on the Security Dashboard document and make it public. Start using TikiTests for systematic testing of risky areas. Using profiles to turn off unsafe features (one-click where you are informed you need to upgrade)	Related links

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Commercial support options / Paid support / Commercial opportunities (B)

Strengths There exists a growing market of full time freelance Tiki Consultants, able to deliver installations that "just work" - for a price. These consultants work well together and share back to the project when they can.	Weaknesses Small market lacks economies of scale, best practices are not transmitted, small outfits lack marketing, mgt and admin specialists.
Opportunities Create an "un-corporation" - a networks of solo/small shops that repeatedly contract each other - encourage specialization in vertical markets, roles, features. Build working relationships between developer teams. All developers become part of the network.	Threats Conflicted interests among competing outfits. Struggle to get the biggest piece of a small pie - rather than focus on growing the pie.
Recommended action Short & Medium term: Grow the Pie 1- Identify & promote Tiki service providers. Started at http://info.tikiwiki.org/Consultants and http://www.wikimatrix.org/consultants/TikiWiki+CMS-Groupware/ 2- Ask these service providers to prepare some guidelines, like a code of conduct of vendors For example: http://typo3.com/Consultancies.1248.0.html http://drupal.org/drupal-services Encourage presence of firms like Citadel Rock at events like Web 2.0 Expo Start a guide to TikiWiki consulting: best practices Medium term: Monitor tender/freelance sites such as Elance Invite vendors who list TikiWiki to participate to the community Have our freelancers be listed WikiFarm - shared hardware platforms. bounty system explicit networks / recommendation system. More Dogfood.	Related links

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Total cost of ownership (TCO) (B)

Thinking of open source like free kittens/puppies, it is necessary to allocate time for maintenance.

Strengths Tiki's all in-one-model makes upgrades easy Fantastico now handles upgrades (can someone confirm this works smoothly?)	Weaknesses Fantastico doesn't upgrade as soon as a version is released. Lots of features: learning curve Not all features are stable in Tiki so it's important to keep experimental features off
Opportunities TRIM is coming along nicely	Threats
Recommended action Improve upgrade script Continue work on TRIM	Related links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership

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Decisional structure / Governance / Guidelines / Rules / Strategic planning (B)

Strengths Currently, Tiki has a lightweight decision-making process. Decisions are taken by consensus, where whoever does the work has more mojo :-) If a vote is needed (which is very rarely the case), the Tiki Admin Group (TAG) has "decisional" power. More on this at TikiSucks. TAG is large enough, is composed of people with various backgrounds and yet, is highly cohesive (as of 2008-06). Social Contract	Weaknesses Decisions and who does what are not clear for the community, especially newcomers.
Opportunities Dogfood Tiki to become a bette E-Democracy system	Threats Some community members could feel that they do not have sufficient influence. There could be doubts about transparency & governance. As of 2008-06, I see no evidence of any risk here. A fork. Forks are usually very bad for everyone. Should be avoided as much as possible. Spending too much time on politics and administration and forgetting that our focus is a a great community building a great community management system (software, the Wiki Way). Rules & guidelines are a means, not a goal. The Tyranny of Stuctureless
Recommended action TAG: (2 + 2 -> we are at a good number now. Renew if some become inactive. Assign more & more responsibilities to contributors promote groups A foundation? Clarify Mission statement or something like a manifesto or philosophy Review Goals Community-managed SWOT	Related links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure

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Documentation (B)

Strengths The documentation is very strong. All in the wiki, and with occasional snapshots to PDF. Easy to point to a specific page. Reality: Not discounting efforts by people to keep things documented, but I think given some of the Weaknesses and Threats, this could easily be considered a C - "Good, but could be better."	Weaknesses 960 pages of printed documentation is great but it's too much information for new people. As of 2008-10, doc team is having trouble with activity level
Opportunities Snapshot documentation on each release and somehow allow users to import it into their own Tiki installs so the help is local. Would probably be a boon for folks in Australia for example, that get redirected to doc.tw.o when they click on a help icon for something. May require reformatting or reorganizing the doc site, but can see huge advantages for people who don't run the SVN version.	Threats The move from 1.9.x to 2.x to 3.x is a challenge. How to efficiently manage the three versions? Current Editorial Board needs new energy
Recommended action Better promotion of TikiWiki for Smarties Reciprocal links between dev.tikiwiki.org and doc.tikiwiki.org for each feature (what Tiki does and what we wish it did) structures and printing improvements for doc.tw.o and any documentation project based on Tiki	Related links

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Install base / Adoption (B)

Strengths TikiWiki has a significant number of installs. In recent versions, a note warns admins of new versions. support.mozilla.com is a great high-profile example	Weaknesses People don't upgrade. We find people with 2-3 year old Tikis We don't know how many installs there are and what features people are using. We can't pull out a feature, confident that almost no one will be affected.
Opportunities A larger install base could bring more energy to the project, in particular if we include invitations to participate and promotional links in default templates.	Threats Security issues because people don't upgrade.
Recommended action Viral TikiWiki and better promotion. profiles for easier installs Nicer themes Create a profile for SourceForge.net Hosted Apps	Related links http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product-Market_Growth_Matrix

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Long term sustainability / Future-proofness / Lock-in protection (B)

Strengths We eat our own DogFood Web 2.0 is often associated to concepts/features that are built-into TikiWiki, such as wikis, blogs, RSS, folksonomy, etc. It was quite ambitious to add all of them in an app, and they are all there, stable and tightly integrated Wikis have proven staying power (What else than a Wiki could power Wikipedia?) Diverse commercial ecosystem (vs 1 main company backing the project) Not fragile to loss of venture-capitalist funding Everything thought/planned in a p2p sustainable way Tiki is a community effort and can't sold and changed to a lock-in model (license, etc.)	Weaknesses Community, install base and bus factor is not quite large to guarantee long term sustainability
Opportunities Improving browsers and desktop integration like Google Gears	Threats New technologies will render browser-based computing (very long term) 10+ years if ever.
Recommended action Better marketing & growing the community Get more large projects like support.mozilla.com Specialize in some niches which increase inflow of contributors like a Software_project profile	Related links

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i18n / translations (A)

Strengths Tiki's i18n features are excellent. Wiki-Translation.com 30+ translations Suitable infrastructure (UTF8, etc.) to support more languages	Weaknesses Nobody in charge so we have no up to date metrics on the state of our translations. No one is actively coordinating with translators.
Opportunities Opportunity for growth in l10n where Tiki would have a local advocate.	Threats None really, just lost opportunities
Recommended action Setup an i18n squad and i18.tikiwiki.org in collaboration with maps.tikiwiki.org Promote TikiFests and local Tiki user groups Continue to be very active with http://wiki-translation.com/	Related links http://docs.joomla.org/Translations_Working_Group

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Components / Platform independence / Code infrastructure / Architecture (B)

Strengths PHP/AdoDB/Smarty were excellent design choices 6 years ago and they still are today. Tiki has been able to leverage these re-use their experience. Tiki's current infrastructure has supported a huge number of features. All-in-one structure makes it both easier and more difficult to evolve.	Weaknesses Tiki has theoretical support for many databases, but in reality, only MySQL is truely stable. All-in-one structure makes it both easier and more difficult to evolve. Code is messy in a lot of places, which makes the Code Infrastructure an area that needs improvement to better support new features. Solid code base, but hard to understand sometimes. Lack of coding documentation (like phpDoc or Doxygen) and enforcement. There are many code duplication in many parts. This makes the code easy to read (which is a strength) but gives a code which is hard to evolve easily. A big amount of work was done (eg on trackers) but there is still a big work to do. All the css stuff is not enough standardised all over the code. Some work was done on that point and now titles, or buttons have more or less the same css structure. But, there is still many to do.
Opportunities http://gophp5.org/ TikiObject Use Tiki more & more as Framework	Threats The hype with new languages. Yet PHP is ahead http://www.ohloh.net/articles/php_eats_rails http://www.ohloh.net/tags/programming_language
Recommended action Developer closer ties with the people at PHP/AdoDB/Smarty Revisit if we should improve DB support or just focus on MySQL Get in touch with PostgreSQL people	Related links

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Upgradeability (A)

Strengths Tiki is super easy to upgrade compared to other CMS. No 3rd party modules/extensions that can break.	Weaknesses Not well enough explained/documentation how to make a theme, and still make it easy to upgrade. Prevents us from removing features.
Opportunities Good PR, because this is advantage over many other systems. In 3.0, update script handles database operations better	Threats When people don't upgrade their Tikis, they can get compromised and it's bad for everyone.
Recommended action Improved documentation about upgrading Tiki Possibly split tiki-install to have a tiki-upgrade.php Adding an RSS feed or some sort of warning system to inform Tiki admins to update. (like Zencart) This RSS feed could be on the main admin page and give infos coming from info.tikiwiki.org. InfrastructureRevamp Continue to improve TRIM	Related links

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Community / Volunteers / Free support (A)

Strengths Friendly Excellent collaborative spirit Many people have been active for a very long time Easy to join the project and to contribute: How to get commit access	Weaknesses While it is sizable, it's too small for a project this size. Too few people are taking on specific responsabilities
Opportunities As long as we organized in a scalable way, the more the merrier.	Threats Since the beginning of the project, there have been a handful of individuals which have caused lots of negative vibe. It could happen again. How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)
Recommended action On a defensive side, give officially the TAG the responsibility to warn, reprimand and then, expel these Poisonous People On the positive side, maybe a community squad. This squad would play a bit the role of human resources in a company. "recruit early, recruit often" • Make it easy to integrate new people • Make sure everyone is happy • Gets proper training • Establish goals in terms of people/activity and send warning signals if we go to low. • Mentorship program • Polls active contributors • Exit survey with everyone who quits • CRM approach to managing our developers. (Dogfooding user trackers) • Make sure no one has a burn-out • Make sure no one is under-utilized. Explain why Tiki is interesting for various types of users (developers, designers, etc). User Type Promote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project to our community as to promote best practices. Follow something like TikiWiki Hierarchy of involvement	Related links http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#managing-volunteers http://eaves.ca/2007/02/05/wikis-and-open-source-collaborative-or-cooperative/ http://www.alwaysdoneitthatway.com/2007/10/21/six-principles-for-designing-an-architecture-of-participation/ http://www.principledinnovation.com/blog/2008/05/17/cognitive-surplus-and-new-incentives-for-engagement/

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Features / Development / Stability (A)

Strengths Arguably the Open source app with the most features built-in. Very active development All-in-one model is very efficient Number of bugs is proportional to number of features	Weaknesses A big strain of dev team for releases. (too much code vs developers) Difficult to know who maintains what. Buggy features are bundled in release and not all tagged as experimental So many features make it difficult to focus. What if I don't want a toolset, but a specific tool?
Opportunities Major Features Missing In TikiWiki Trackers and Profiles will permit to increase features while keeping the code base manageable.	Threats A Software Engineering Odyssey -> NT 3.1 vs Windows 2000 story
Recommended action Continue & enhance communication & collaboration amongst devs Include more developers Make it easier for people to know who works on what TikiTests Have a way to clearly identity all experimental features/settings (as of now, it's just first level. No easy way to see if subfeature of X is experimental	Related links

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Eating our own Dogfood (A)

Strengths We eat our DogFood for almost everything. This ensures that our community and the code moves cohesively. Our community and eating our own Dogfood are the two most important things.	Weaknesses Our tools are not always good for everything, especially at first.
Opportunities To improve Tiki and efficiency of our community members.	Threats Wasted time as we are sawing the branch we are sitting on.
Recommended action Continue! Re-converge community-focus on tikiwiki.org and keep dev.tikiwiki.org just for dev stuff SourceForge mailing lists could take advantage of Forum and List Synchronization feature Dogfood subscribe group plugin in tikiwiki.org DogFood	Related links

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http://www.typo3-swot.com/
http://plone.org/events/2008-summit/customer-segments-swot-analysis
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Strategic_Marketing_Plan#SWOT
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/CONF09/Sakai+SWOT+Analysis


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software_assessment_methodologies
How to Evaluate Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS) Programs by
David A. Wheeler
http://producingoss.com/
Community Projects
Ongoing Community Tasks





Should events be its own section?

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