TWiki Meetup

Last night was the first Silicon Valley TWiki User Meetup. TWiki is an open-source , open-development, structured wiki, a web-based collaboration system. I've been using TWiki since mid-2006. I work with it a LOT at the Job.

The Meetup was held at the Plug and Play Tech Center (.com) in Sunnyvale. Nice place, if a bit hard to figure out where to park.

There were 50+ attendees. First there was networking and munchies. I networked with the "TWiki" Birdie, a beautiful female White-Bellied Caique (parrot). She's the twiki.net mascot and "Social Networking Catalyst, as well as a total sweetheart.

The meeting started with a brief introduction and a presentation by Peter Thoeny, the author of TWiki, on Wikis in the Workplace. That was followed by a presentation on collaboration, by Rod Beckstom, based on the concepts in his book The Starfish and the Spider. I expect to be picking up a copy of that book r.s.n.

Next was Q&A, some more networking (this time on specific topics), and several people saying what they would like to do with TWiki to support their "core passions".

Last were the "TWiki Champion" presentations. I knew about this ahead of time and had put something together. There were 5 presentations and then the audience voted for "best". There were three prizes.

First prize went to me! Wow. I'd like to thank the Academy ... no, that's the Oscars. Anyway. I was very pleased.

Second prize went to Ian Kluft who showed how to run multiple TWiki sites from a single code installation. (Cool stuff. I voted for Ian. :-)

As Peter Thoeny said "We had lots of fun, networking, pizza, beer and wine. Let's repeat that!"

TWiki Meetup ( in category Trivial Pursuits , WebTech ) - posted at Fri, 30 Nov, 21:42 Pacific | «e»