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SWOT

As of 2022-03-06, the last significant update to this page was in 2012 or so, and thus, many things have changed and it deserves a major review. Any volunteers?

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 Tiki headed? Please see: Goals

 Image

Goals of this page:

  1. A community-managed S.W.O.T. for the Tiki community
  2. A lightweight participative strategic planning tool
  3. Dogfood the use of Tiki 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.tiki.org
  4. This could evolve into better risk analysis, gap analysis and mindmap tools in Tiki. 😀

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 Tiki 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 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.



Easy Hosting / SaaS / Hosted solutions / Wikifarm (D)


Priority of the Packaging Team.

Strengths

  • As a PHP/MySQL app, Tiki is already very easy and inexpensive to host, and available through all the major 1-click installers. The installers will even handle upgrades, and thus, it's almost SaaS. However, it would still be nice to have SaaS with application support.
  • Tiki should be great for server farms, because people can customize a lot with same code base. Otherwise, users request various extensions/plugins and then, each install can have different files. See Hosting company.
  • Having both Open Source and hosted solution provides lots of benefits. (evolving platform, protection against vendor lock-in, etc.)
  • Some farms like http://www.iscpif.fr/web-hosting
Weaknesses

  • This page is a huge mess: Tiki Friendly Hosts
  • While their are tons of hosts (shared hosting, etc.) that can host Tiki Tiki Friendly Hosts, etc, no one is offering dedicated Tiki hosting at the moment, with 24/7 enterprise support.
  • Would need a way to be able to offer simplified admin panels (as started in Dynamic Preferences) Done in Tiki8


Opportunities
Threats

  • Hosting company tries and fails (hosting business is difficult) leaving customers without a solution

Recommended action

  1. Document on info.tiki.org an easy path to get started with Tiki
    • Recommended hosts/installers/etc.
  2. Message to 1-click installers about Tiki LTS
  3. Encourage emergence of such service providers, which could specialize.
  4. Continue work on TRIM and MultiTiki as tools for WikiFarms
  5. Testing Tiki installations on major Shared Hosting companies
  6. Live Support Service
  7. Experiment with EC2
  8. Pursue Workspace Roadmap
  9. Develop Tiki Suite
  10. Approach FOSS service companies
  11. Approach SaaS providers and test their interest
Related links


Teams / Working groups / Special interest groups / local user groups / p2p leadership (C)

Priority of Tiki Admin Group and Community Building Team

Strengths

Tiki as an app has pretty much all the features to support this.
Weaknesses

Too few functional Teams.

Opportunities

Growth
Easier integration of newcomers
DogFood for Social Networking
Threats

Without teams, the organization can't scale

Recommended action

  1. Assign more & more responsibilities to contributors and improve that page with pictures & bios
    1. Make a global list of tags/categories/responsibilities
  2. Promote Teams by dogfooding workspaces
    • November 2009 (Tiki4), Workspaces will be used for a more p2p organizational model for the community.
  3. Establish groundwork for emergence of local user groups like Drupal by using all the revamped Map features in recent versions of Tiki, TikiFests and i18n.tiki.org
  4. Setup Viral Tiki and Connect
  5. Formalize and make a strategy around the Evolution of participation
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
http://www.wikisym.org/2009/08/10/wikisym-2009-keynote-community-performance-optimization-making-your-people-run-as-smoothly-as-your-site/

Integration of new contributors to the community (D)

Priority of Community Building Team and Wishlist Triage Team (because they see the good bug reports and patches)

Strengths
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

  1. Make sure tiki-register.php is useable/useful
  2. Better documentation and examples. Plugins and modules are great to learn from. Shoutbox is a good example as well.
  3. More formal Teams
  4. Mentorship program
  5. Better promotion of IRC & Mailing Lists
  6. Better explain Where to find information and to participate.
Related links



Migration to Tiki (C-)

Priority of the Consulting Ecosystem Team.

Strengths

Tiki 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 Tiki 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

  1. Look into easing migration from specialized popular applications who do not intend to become full-featured systems (ex.: MediaWiki).
Related links



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

Once marketing worked and people do indeed decide to try it out.
Priority of UX and Themes Team (for visitors and content editors) and Configuration Profiles Team (for site admins)

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


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.
  • Lack of available ressources for small projects makes clients disappointed.

Recommended action
Related links

Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak

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

Priority of UX and Themes Team

Strengths

Tiki is very themeable.
Themes.tiki.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.tiki.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

  1. Setup a theme/UX and Themes Team Gary, luci, Patrick, ricks99, etc. are doing a great job
  2. Improve the content editing interface Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0
  3. Improve the admin interface Much better in 3.0
  4. More user & centric design Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0
  5. 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.
  6. For themes.tiki.org to be less of a theme testing place and more of a I-want-to-download-and-install type of place. demo.tiki.org could be used to test themes.
  7. http://UI.tiki.org project Done a bit for 3.0, more to come in 4.0
  8. Skeleton theme for designers done in 5.0
Related links

Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak

tiki.org Information / Promotion / Marketing / Public Relations (C)

Priority of Communications Team, Branding Team and Consulting Ecosystem Team.

Strengths
Weaknesses



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 Tiki. 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

  1. TikiFest2008-Montreal-3 Done, but still need to do a lot of follow-ups
  2. More TikiTV
  3. Setup a Communications Team (handling press/incoming mail)
    Image Actively monitor & respond to general inquires, send out regular news articles.
  4. once we have enough nice case studies, do a 30sec. video of the best of Tiki
  5. Contact blogs & online media to have Tiki Reviews and Interviews
  6. TwoRevamp
    Image http://info.tiki.org.
  7. Wiki Landscape
  8. 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 Tiki vs Drupal pages for all the major ones.
  9. 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?).
  10. http://info.tiki.org/Fact+Sheet
  11. Define USP
  12. WhoWhat with pictures & bios
  13. Better explain Where to find information and to participate.
    Image By default, new t.o registrants are now taken to the Tiki Welcome page after registration.
  14. Nobody ever got fired for picking MediaWiki
  15. Make a community version of http://marclaporte.com/TikiSucks to better explain the advantages of our model Done: Model
  16. Develop a Logo usage and brand guide like Joomla!
    Image http://branding.tiki.org
  17. Make a 2 min. promo slideshow about Tiki on Slideshare and each of us add it to our websites, LinkedIn page, blogs, etc...
  18. Around the 3.0 release, start a design/marketing contest for new identity (logo, branding, etc.) Done
Related links


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

Priority of Analytics Team and Tiki Admin Group

Strengths

Tiki 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
Related links


Licensing / Legal (C)

Priority of Legal Team

Strengths

Tiki uses LGPL, which is a Standard OSI license
Active Legal Team
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.tiki.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

  1. Getting in contact with people like http://www.softwarefreedom.org/ and http://conservancy.softwarefreedom.org/ to get preventive assistance.
  2. Check source code for licenses with http://fossology.org/
Related links



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

Priority of Developers Team

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
  • Mods is not maintained.

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.tiki.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

  1. Add more support for various: interactions
  2. Invest time in WebservicePlugin
  3. Decide what we do with mods
    • Nothing (just let it float)
    • Fix
    • Drop and push profiles
Related links



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

Priority of the Communications Team and Tiki Admin Group

Strengths

  • Tiki already supports a large number of standards via various interactions
  • Participation to WikiSym 2007, 2008 and planned in 2009
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

  1. Add more support for various: interactions
  2. Participate to more events
  3. Tiki community members should keep/improve contacts with
  • 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



Money and Fundraising (C)

Priority of Fundraising Team and Finance Team.

Strengths

The Tiki association has a bank account.
Easy to make donations at http://tiki.org/Donation
Weaknesses

While there are occasional sources of funding, there is no major recurring revenue.

Opportunities

  • 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

  1. Short term: Continue the informal way, where people donate directly to active contributors and make a list of Potential Funding
  2. Start a Finance Team
  3. Start a Fundraising Team
  4. 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. Think Firefox
    • Viral Tiki
Related links

http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#money
http://www.spi-inc.org/about/

Sites & infrastructure (C)

Priority of Dogfood Team and Infrastructure Team

Strengths

Current *.tiki.org are split amongst several community members
Tiki 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 the 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

  1. Look into: http://osuosl.org/hosting/services
  2. Move all site management to TRIM
Related links

http://docs.joomla.org/Sites_and_Infrastructure_Working_Group


Customizability / Hackability (B)

Priority of Developers Team

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



Performance / Scalability / Server load (B)

Priority of Performance Team

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.

Tiki4: A new Performance admin panel was added to help people optimize.
Some proactive performance profile was done on Tiki5, and our YSLOW score was drastically improved with Minify JS and Minify CSS

Reality: we have no metrics to compare Tiki performance to other similar applications (Drupal, Mambo, etc).
Weaknesses

  • Tiki has a really bad reputation for performance because, for the longest time, tiki.org was hosted on a personal server. This server was underpowered and overloaded. Ever since Oliver Hertel took over tiki.org on a server from server4you.de, it has been zippy.

Reality: we have no metrics to compare Tiki performance to other similar applications (Drupal, Mambo, etc).


Opportunities

Large projects have been very helpful and will continue to be hugely helpful to identify real bottleneck with real data (vs some people interested in theory and worrying about performance bottleneck, which in reality, are not).
Threats

FUD: the same way it's difficult for other to prove Tiki is worse than another given app, it's very difficult for us to prove that Tiki is fast/scaleable.

Recommended action

  • Launch Performance challenge
  • 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



Security (B)

Priority of Security Team

Strengths

  1. Good track record at fixing reported important security vulnerabilities.
  2. 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.
  3. In recent versions of Tiki, 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).
  4. A security script is part of the release procedure and detects potentially unsafe files.
  5. Clearly identified members of the Security Team
  6. A dedicated security resource: http://security.tiki.org
  7. Tiki is inherently pretty secure because it strips all javascript and doesn't interpret html. You can give html permission to a group however. (Drawback has been for usability)
Weaknesses

  1. Users do not upgrade their Tiki
  2. No formal guidelines on what is a security problem, so path disclosure bugs, while minor, are not systematically treated.
  3. No systematic security audits.
  4. 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.
  5. Security team needs new fresh blood.
  6. Tiki is so massive, that it's a lot of work to release new versions.
  7. 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 & Tiki users getting compromised

Recommended action

  1. Since security is such a vast subject, identify some leaders for various aspects.
  2. Put the finishing touches on the Security Dashboard document and make it public.
  3. Start using TikiTests for systematic testing of risky areas.
  4. Using profiles to turn off unsafe features (one-click where you are informed you need to upgrade)
Related links



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

Priority of the Consulting Ecosystem Team.

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.
Top-2 on WikiMatrix
Weaknesses

The small market lacks economies of scale, best practices are not transmitted, small outfits lack marketing, mgt and admin specialists.

Opportunities

Create an "un-corporation" - 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.tiki.org/Consultants and http://www.wikimatrix.org/consultants/Tiki+Wiki+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 Tiki consulting: best practices

  • Review all Tiki-powered sites to search for
    • web shops that made the site for others
    • tech firms / web shops / consultants / etc which use Tiki and invite them (ML invited 20 towards the end of November 2011)
      • Tiki Suite is a new option

Medium term:
  • Monitor tender/freelance sites such as Upwork
    • Invite vendors who list Tiki to participate to the community
    • Have our freelancers be listed
  • WikiFarm - shared hardware platforms.
  • bounty system
  • explicit networks / recommendation system. More Dogfood.
  • Maybe a form on info.tiki.org to reach all consultants at once?
  • Live Support Service
Related links


Total cost of ownership (TCO) (B)

Priority of the Tiki Admin Group

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
  • Tiki upgrade script is pretty good (can upgrade from any to any future version)
  • 1-click installers support upgrades
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
Related links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_cost_of_ownership

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

Priority of Community Building Team and the Tiki Admin Group.

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 has "decisional" power. More on this at model. 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 better E-Democracy system
Threats

  1. 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.
  2. A fork. Forks are usually very bad for everyone. Should be avoided as much as possible.
  3. 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.
  4. The Tyranny of Stuctureless

Recommended action

  1. TAG: (2 + 2 -> we are at a good number now. Renew if some become inactive.
  2. Assign more & more responsibilities to contributors
  3. promote groups
  4. A foundation
  5. Clarify Mission statement or something like a manifesto or philosophy
  6. Community-managed SWOT
Related links

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_power_structure
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_governance
http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure
http://webmink.com/essays/open-by-rule/
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/governanceModels
http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/ssmm

Documentation (C)

Priority of Documentation Team

Strengths

The documentation is "Good, but could be better.". All in the wiki, and with occasional snapshots to PDF. Easy to point to a specific page.
Weaknesses

  • 960 pages of printed documentation is great but it's too much information for new people.
  • As of 2011-09, doc team is having trouble with activity level
  • Features are developed/improved faster than the documentation can keep up to date.
  • While some pages are of excellent quality, overall navigation is confusing for new users.
  • Too many links on doc.tiki.org
  • Structure hard to keep up to date

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

  1. Better promotion of Tiki for Smarties and Tiki Essentials
  2. Reciprocal links between dev.tiki.org and doc.tiki.org for each feature (what Tiki does and what we wish it did)
  3. structures and printing improvements for doc.tw.o and any documentation project based on Tiki
Related links



Install base / Adoption (C)

Priority of Communications Team, Consulting Ecosystem Team and Packaging Team.

Strengths
Weaknesses

  1. People don't upgrade. We find people with 2-3-year-old Tikis
  2. 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

  1. Testing Tiki installations on major Shared Hosting companies
  2. Focus on 1-click installers
  3. Viral Tiki and better promotion.
  4. profiles for easier installs
  5. Nicer themes
Related links


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product-Market_Growth_Matrix

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

Priority of the Tiki Admin Group.

Strengths

  • We eat our own DogFood
  • Web 2.0 is often associated to concepts/features that are built-into Tiki, 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 be 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 HTML5
Threats

  • While it feels unlikely now, there could be new technologies that render PHP apps like Tiki obsolete (And would render WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal obsolete as well)
  • While it inconceivable that new technologies will render browser-based computing (very long term) 10+ years if ever, there could be a shift to how we generate them.

This is only a threat if we (Tiki, PHP, etc.) don't adapt.




Recommended action

  • Better marketing & growing the community
  • Get more large projects which have long term vested interest (not just small websites, which can change to new tech willy nilly)
  • Specialize in some niches which increase inflow of contributors like a Software_project profile
Related links



i18n / translations (B)

Priority of i18n Team

Strengths

  • Tiki's i18n features are excellent.
  • Wiki-Translation.com
  • 40+ translations (but many incomplete)
  • 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.
Could be easier to translate
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

  1. Setup an i18n Team and i18.tiki.org in collaboration with the use of maps.
  2. Promote TikiFests and local Tiki user groups
  3. Continue to be very active with http://wiki-translation.com/
Related links

http://docs.joomla.org/Translations_Working_Group


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

Priority of Developers Team

Strengths

PHP/MySQL/Smarty were excellent design choices 10 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.
Newer additions of PDO, Zend_Framework and jQuery improve Tiki without more code overhead.
Weaknesses

  • All-in-one structure makes it both easier and more difficult to evolve.
    • Easier because we can change everything
    • More difficult because we take everything into account
  • 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.
  • Architecture Suggestions From Mozilla for high volume sites.

Opportunities

TikiObject
Use Tiki more & more as Framework
HTML5
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

  1. Developer closer ties with the people at PHP/Zend Framework/MySQL/Smarty/jQuery
Related links



Lifecycle, releases and packaging (A)

Priority of Packaging Team and Release Team

Strengths

  • All in one package makes it simple
  • Release scripts are highly efficient
  • Lifecycle and LTS
    • Much faster release cycle than other similar apps. Tiki is now 6-month release while many others are 18-24 months
      • 2009-05: Tiki3 LTS
      • 2009-11: Tiki4
      • 2010-06: Tiki5
      • 2010-11: Tiki6 LTS
      • 2011-06: Tiki7
      • 2011-11: Tiki8
      • 2012-06: Tiki9 LTS
      • 2012-12: Tiki10
      • 2013-07: Tiki11
      • 2013-10 (planned): Tiki12 LTS
  • Our packaging expert (changi) is on top of things!
  • More promotion by frequent releases
  • Fast release schedule is great for consultant ecosystem.
Weaknesses

Much too long cycles between 1.9 and 2.0 releases Solved
Tiki is no longer included in distros such as Debian
No PPA, .deb or RPM

Opportunities

  • In a few years, we could start thinking of a 4-month release-cycle, but as of 2012, there is no benefit.
Threats

People get discouraged because the feature they coded a long time ago in 1.10 is not yet in stable release. Solved
Other applications have wanted features in stable release. Solved as we now are very responsive to new opportunities
  • A threat is to lose focus and the cadence, but this is quasi-impossible because this is now part of the DNA of the community. The releases could become smaller in terms of new features because more & more people have all that they need, but that is OK and we'll always have enough to warrant new releases.

Recommended action

  1. Pursue "Release early, release often" 6-month release with LTS -> Lifecycle
Related links



Upgradeability (A)

Priority of Developers Team and Packaging Team

Strengths

  • Tiki is super easy to upgrade compared to other CMS. No 3rd party modules/extensions that can break.
  • Site Identity lets you configure many things in the the admin panel (site title, sub title, footer)
  • Theme options let you make a custom CSS by overriding just what you need, while keeping in sync with one of the bundled themes.
  • 1-click installers handles upgrades
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 an 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

  1. Improved documentation about upgrading Tiki
  2. Possibly split tiki-install to have a tiki-upgrade.php
  3. 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.tiki.org.
  4. InfrastructureRevamp
  5. Continue to improve TRIM
  6. Work with more Control Panels to handle upgrades.
Related links



Community / Volunteers / Free support (A)

Priority of Community Building Team

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 team. This team 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.

  1. Explain why Tiki is interesting for various types of users (developers, designers, etc). Use Cases
  2. Promote Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project to our community as to promote best practices.
  3. Follow something like Tiki 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/

Features / Development / Stability / Interoperability (A)

Priority of Developers Team and Continuous Integration Team

Strengths
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 Tiki
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

  1. Watch out for Earthquakes
  2. Continue & enhance communication & collaboration amongst devs
  3. Include more developers
  4. Make it easier for people to know who works on what
  5. TikiTests
  6. 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



Eating our own Dogfood (A)

Priority of Dogfood Team

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

  1. Continue!
  2. Re-converge community-focus on tiki.org and keep dev.tiki.org just for dev stuff
  3. SourceForge mailing lists could take advantage of Forum and List Synchronization feature
  4. Dogfood subscribe group plugin in tiki.org
  5. DogFood
Related links



Other SWOTs for Open Source projects

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

Related links


Todo

This SWOT should stay high-level and most of the specifics should be moved to the relevant Teams or project page.

Should events be its own section?
Should we have an "Enterprise-readiness" section?
Make a new section with reliability & stability (regressions, testing, eyeballs, bug density)
Should "standards" should go with "Extensibility / Expandability / Mashups / Integration with 3rd party apps & code reuse"
Should we split the "Installation" and add a new section "the first 30 minutes"?

History
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