Peter Thoeny of TWiki and StructuredWikis gave a sf.pm.org talk tonite in San Francisco on wikis and knowledge management. About a dozen people attended. He said it was similar to a talk he gave at Google recently.
Peter is the original author of TWiki, based on the source of an older wiki project. TWiki is written in Perl and licensed under the GPL. He has done consulting for numerous Silicon Valley companies, installing and customizing internal wikis for companies such as Oracle and Wind River.
The TWiki project has 5 core programmers (committers), with many other people submitting patches, testing and writing plug-ins.
Peter is originally from Switzerland, but enjoyed working in Japan for 8 years, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1998.
He’s a typical European speaker, with a lot of slides (52) and a lot of writing on the slides. Very thorough.
The audience oohed and aahed when he demoed the form creation and editing feature of TWiki. It’s possible to prototype small applications using TWiki syntax.
A bank employee, who was required to attend, mentioned investigating wikis for corporate knowledge management and documenting source code.
His philosophy on access control to wiki pages is that if a user can see it, then they should be able to edit it. Also, all engineers in a company should be able to see all wiki pages related to engineering. Otherwise the benefits of knowledge sharing are lost when too many silos are erected.
Peter also talked a little about “situational wikis.” These are wikis or wiki sections created for special projects, used intensively, then kept online for historical purposes only after the project ends.
I used TWiki at Yahoo! and Cisco, but currently use mediawiki in a small company.
Another person who works at Yahoo! mentioned that they have finally upgraded TWiki from a 2000-ish version.
I would say that TWiki and mediawiki are the 2 most popular wikis in Silicon Valley, with TWiki more suitable for enterprise use when authentication is needed, and mediawiki being popular with groups already familiar with editing Wikipedia and who are not interested in lots of plug-ins.
We had a drink at Maxwell’s in the Hilton hotel afterwards. He said that he has worked with other scripting languages such as Python, but still appreciates Perl. His opinion of Perl’s OO features is that overall OO Perl is ok, but needing bless is quite odd.
2 attendees were looking for Perl work, and one person was looking for a Perl shopping cart programmer. Peter is hiring Perl programmers for a new stealth company he is involved in.
Thanks to Barclays Global Investors for hosting the talk and continuing support of sf.pm.org. I understand they are always looking for good Perl programmers who enjoy wearing a suit to work.
