History: Viral Tiki
Preview of version: 3
Table of contents
Background info about "Viral"
- Alistair Croll's presention on Viral marketing (link to slides soon I hope). Alistair switches from French to English at the 3rd minute.
- What Is Your Most Valuable Business Asset? TikiWiki is a free source community project (and not a business) so read this in this light but the idea is the same.
Background about TikiWiki
TikiWiki is downloaded over 8000 times a month. There are probably even more (no way to know) installs via Fantastico installer (or others). TikiWiki is used in tens of thousands of web sites/projects/communities/companies. And many more are used behind the Firewall. Again, we have no reliable way to know.
Yet, only a tiny fraction of these installations result in active contributions to the TikiWiki community. How can we increase this? If we increase from .01% to .03% (for example), we just tripled the size of the community!
We already have a way for people to register their TikiWiki site to tikiwiki.org (not sure how well it works). While people may want to see others at the early stages, they may not want to share at first because the site is not ready. They should be reminded periodically.
A first step is the new "version check" added to 1.9.9 So Tiki admins are now informed via their admin panel when their TikiWiki install needs an upgrade.
What else could we do? (Everything would be optional)
Things should be peer-to-peer and scalable. Keep in mind that some people are responsible for many TikiWiki installations AND some TikiWiki installations would have several users which would be interested/interesting for viral initiatives.
Why
- To grow the community
- For users to help each other
- To facilitate the creation of local TikiWiki user groups which are positive assets to their local open knowledge / free source software community.
Ideas
Who to connect? TikiWiki users by
Geography
Think http://geourl.org/
TikiWiki installs can enter a geolocalisation and can find out about other TikiWiki installs/admins within their area, and to encourage the formation of local user groups. Why not combine with TikiMaps? 😊
Language
TikiWiki is translated in 30+ languages.
Common interest
Have topics/tags/keywords/categories for TikiWiki-powered sites and permit users to connect with related/similar sites/users. Maybe offer an automagic webring module?
- Stéphane Daury suggests Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML)
- Lorinc brought up Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, or SIOC
Use Cases
There are over 30 Use Cases for TikiWiki (and people often use a TikiWiki for more than 1 use case. Community members could connect with people which share a Use Case.
How to connect?
Live Chat
One-click access to a chat room for TikiWiki admins / power users like Firefox. We could use Skype's group chat (max 100, but now works with Linux), IRC or develop/improve a Tiki chat solution.
Forums, etc
Forums, wiki pages, etc
Local meetings
If someone organizes a local TikiWiki user group, it should appear in the TikiWiki admin panel of all people within x km.
Reporting back to the mothership
- Since 1.9.10, TikiWiki instances check with tw.o for news of new releases
- Reporting errors (to tikiwiki.org) system (like Firefox Talkback)
- optional reporting of anonymized usage stats & patterns (which features are used, how many accounts, etc)
What else?
It was noted at the www.Blitzweekend.com
- To be successful, Tiki needs to be easier to use.
- Older fashion better promotion via "powered by TikiWiki" (instead of the obtrusive one at the top)
TikiWiki community members expressing support
How could TikiWiki users be invited to vote for TikiWiki in awards like the ones monitored by the PromoSquad? This could be a box fed by RSS in tiki-admin.php?
Other ideas
Have something like planet TikiWiki where we aggregate blogs from various community members.
You realize what's happening, right? Starting (I think in 1.9.10), the default bottom bar says Powered by Tikiwiki with a link to tw.o. Apparently folks are clicking that link, thinking that is who runs the website.
Maybe we could/should have a custom landing page for folks clicking a POWERED BY link. It could take them to a list of reasons why *they* should use Tikiwiki....