Case study on the power of mass collaboration by SocialText

In short, it is about the Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) investment banking arm of the Dresdener Bank that went a long way establishing means to share information in every part of their company as efficient and manyfold as possible as decision-making is their bread and butter obviously.

DrKW started using wiki technologies in 1997 using Kwiki and then got in touch with SocialText and its hosted services 7 years later. Note, that Kwiki is related to SocialText in a quite typical - and IMHO sad - way that is observable in many places nowadays. Compare it to Mambo vs. Joomla.

Yes, I know that forking is OK in the FOSS way. The ``fork principle'' only works out if there's more pressure not to fork in order to reduce diversifying efforts. Forks in FOSS land happen because of internal pressure that overwhelm coherence. But now forks happen because FOSS gets attracted by big business that drags efforts out of FOSS, which is bad. Same story, different actors: Safari. As far as I can tell from my own perception the Konqueror community is bypassing now Safari ...

People at SocialText still seem to be deeply rooted in FOSS, reading about their desire to return to its OpenSouce roots.

Anyway, interesting company. Kudos to them for spreading the wiki message (fighing information silos etc). But keep in mind that you have digest their wiki literature through a SocialText filter. Comming to the point which light this shades on efforts in the TWiki community. React? Not, yet.