History: Viral Tiki

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 the Tiki software

Tiki is downloaded over 8000 times a month. There are probably even more (no way to know) installs via Fantastico installer (or others). Tiki 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 Tiki powered 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 Tiki 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 Tiki installations AND some Tiki 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.

Microblogging

OpenMicroBlogging

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. Done in Tiki3 and Tiki4
• Older fashion better promotion via "powered by TikiWiki" (instead of the obtrusive one at the top) Done in Tiki3

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.

Related links

http://www.epolitics.com/2009/01/14/what-does-viral-mean/

Update
For the month April 2009, 37% of incoming links to http://tikiwiki.org were from http://support.mozilla.com. This is obviously due to the "Powered by Tiki" link at the bottom of every SUMO page. This represents a huge potential mindshare for Tiki.

What I (ricks99) propose:

1. Update tiki-bot_bar.tpl to include:
   
   Copy to clipboard

   {if $prefs.feature_bot_bar_power_by_tw ne 'n'}
    {tr}Powered by{/tr} <a href="http://info.tikiwiki.org/Powered+{$base_url|urlencode}" title="&#169; 2002&#8211;{$smarty.now|date_format:"%Y"} {tr}The TikiWiki Community{/tr}">{tr}TikiWiki CMS/Groupware{/tr}</a> {if $prefs.feature_topbar_version eq 'y'} v{$tiki_version} {if $tiki_uses_svn eq 'y'} (SVN){/if} -{$tiki_star}- {/if} | 
   {/if}

   
   This will create a customized Powered by... link for every site that uses Tiki. For example, the link used by SUMO will now become:
   http://info.tikiwiki.org/Powered+http://support.mozilla.com
2. On info.tw.o, create a new Powered page:
   
   The website you were viewing somehow display the originating URL uses Tiki to power its content.
   Tiki is.... etc.
   
3. For high profile site (such as SUMO) we could a specific page detailing why that particular organization selected Tiki.
4. On info.tw.o, enable the If page does not exist, display similar page option. This way, referrals from http://support.mozilla.com will go directly to the http://info.tikiwiki.org/Powered+http://support.mozilla.com page, but a referral from http://someotherdomain.com will simply go to http://info.tikiwiki.org/Powered

What are your ideas/comments/suggestions?

Related links

• connect
• Ad_Serving

• Viral TikiWiki
• Snowball Tiki from the Snowball effect
• Snowball TikiWiki