OpenGarden.org has finally taken its rightful place as the MindTouch Developer Center. For now, not much has changed except for the new address: http://developer.mindtouch.com. Your login continues to work and your bookmarks are redirected automatically. But in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be giving MDC a facelift and a new structure that will make it easier to find, contribute, and connect with fellow community members.

Why are we doing this?

There were really two needs I felt we had to address. First, the artificial dichotomy between OpenGarden and MindTouch created a semblance of a two-class structure: MindTouch and the Community. This was never the case, as we all know from our active collaboration on the forums and the wiki. Yet, appearances matter sometime. This small adjustment simply makes it clear to new members that we are one family.

Second, there was some overlap in content between MindTouch and OpenGarden, which caused confusion as to the purposes of the two sites. MDC will be specifically tailored to address the needs and wants of those who want to get the most out of MindTouch Deki: its capabilities, its extensions, its API, and its multi-platform support. To that end, the new structure will make it easier to discover the full set of features, as well as provide an equal home for contributions from MindTouch and the Community alike.

The MindTouch Developer Center is a long-term investment. Its build out will continue over months and years. And it will happen in small incremental steps so that everyone can participate to move it in the right direction.

I’m looking forward to creating with your help the best place for learning and sharing everything there is to know about MindTouch Deki!

In the annals of time certain weapons have stood out, surpassing all others in strength and use. Thor swung his great hammer to smite those who stood in his way. Arthur pulled Excalibur from the stone and lead humanity to Avalon. And Beatrix Kiddo beat all odds to rescue her daughter and “Kill Bill” with the aid of the Hattori Hanzo sword. Yet now, a new weapon has been forged and hardened in the blazing fire of a bright mind to cut through the most perilous environments of our modern world: the office. The name of this weapon: MindTouch Deki.

Wednesday the 16th of July 2008, MindTouch will be hosting the first ever Deki-Con. Deki-Con is a rare chance for the student to learn from the masters of the Deki Way. Deki-Con is open to all who want to make their Deki skills fierce like tiger. MindTouch will provide food to strengthen mind and body, and libation to celebrate the completion of training.

Sensei Steve, creator of the Deki way, will be performing a dangerous exhibition on how to wield DekiScript to create dynamic pages in MindTouch Deki.  If the students prove worthy; Sensei will share his wisdom into the occult art of XML extensions to achieve true enlightenment.

Master Damien, a 3rd degree black belt in the art of CSS, will guide the students through the elegant moves of the Fiesta architecture completing the lesson with training on the lightening-fast skinning, known as the Fiesta Form.

To all students of the Deki Way, near and far, come join us and make your Deki skills strong! The masters will only take a few students. Take action now and reserve your place.

What: Deki-Con (Hand-to-Hand Developer Training)

When: Wednesday July 16th

Start Time: 6:04 PM

Where: MindTouch Dojo 555 W. Beech St Suite 501 San Diego, CA 92101

Cost: Free

RSVP Required: http://dekicon.eventbrite.com/

For additional information or questions contact: events AT mindtouch DOT com

Our friends at Bungee Labs invited me to participate for one of their tech podcasts. They did a great job organizing the interview and asking great questions. Hats off to them!

MindTouch’s Steve Bjorg joins us to tell us all about their wiki platform called “Deki.” MindTouch is rapidly growing Deki’s install base, largely on its slick user interface. But there’s something hidden under the all the UI slickness: under the hood, Deki supports a comprehensive web API. In fact, the PHP user interface fully delegates all operations over web-service calls to the API. In other words, web-dev geeks like us can safely customize or extend the UI without risk of interfering with Deki’s business logic, such as page permissions or revisions. Coooool! Oh, and did we mention that it’s Free Software?

Here is the link to the podcast. Enjoy!

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It has been an exceptional 2 years since we first released MindTouch Deki July, 2006 at the OSCON conference in Portland, OR. In this short time we’ve had many remarkable successes. Since then we’ve achieved a lot to be proud of. We’ve established ourselves as leaders and innovators in the rapidly growing Enterprise 2.0 and Social Enterprise Software space. As a leader in this burgeoning space MindTouch has acquired hundreds of fantastic customers, such as ABB, Mozilla, Intel, Fujitsu, Avaya, Siemens, BP, FedEx and countless others.

Successes
One of the easiest to analyze metrics of our success is adoption. Today we enjoy upwards of 2,000 downloads a day and now have over 200,000 active installations worldwide. Another great success is our partner program which gives MindTouch Deki a presence in 10 countries. Additionally one of the most exciting proof points is our first user organized conference that took place in the Fall of 2007 in Belgium.

One of the most important parts of building a company is the team that develops as the company matures. I’m really honored to be part of this team. Two years ago, about a year before I started at MindTouch, the company consisted of six full time employees. Although we’ve since grown to 18 full time employees we’re still a very tight-knit family. The people I work with are the smartest and most dedicated people I’ve ever known. We all really care about each other, our community, FLOSS, making the world a better place and building the best product in the Enterprise 2.0 / Social Enterprise Software space. I’m certain we’ve achieved this last point.

About the OSCON Party
Join MindTouch at OSCON for a night of great music, free beer and good company. We’re hosting the party a block away from the Portland Convention Center (where OSCON is hosted) in the 6th floor lounge and terrace of the Red Lion Hotel on Wednesday July 23rd at 7pm.

Why are we celebrating Freedom?
The MindTouch “Freedom” celebration embodies one of the core values of MindTouch, freedom. We have developed MindTouch Deki as free and open-source software. We’ve utilized open standards and open file formats. We’ve integrated hundreds of services and applications for freedom from data and application silos. Most importantly we’ve encouraged free knowledge and the sharing of collaborative information. Our efforts and consistent devotion to freedom is ever prevalent in our software and as part of our corporate culture because we know that such an approach is vital to all technology, and society as a whole.

I hope to see you there!

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

I’m happy to announce that MindTouch will be sponsoring the first Net.working social event in San Diego on June 23rd. Net.working is geared towards providing a social atmosphere for entrepreneurs, startups, technology advocates and new local talent alike.

The event will be hosted by StartupSD and kicks off at 6pm at J6-bar in downtown San Diego. For more information please visit the Net.working event page. Space is limited so be sure to RSVP.

Hope to see you there!

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com

Yesterday, Google announced the general availability of Google App Engine, another option for deploying Cloud Software.

Google App Engine is a great place to create and share extensions for MindTouch Deki. By design, Deki is a distributed application platform that can be extended in any programming language, including C#, PHP, Java, Python, and the built-in DekiScript runtime. Sharing these extensions can be difficult though since you need to find a place to host them. This is were Google App Engine comes in.

Getting started is incredibly simple:

1. Download the App Engine SDK.
2. Create a new application.
3. Add the DekiExt.py file to it.

After that, creating your own extension only takes a few lines of code:

class MyExtension(DekiExt):

# title for the extension
def title(self): return "My Extension"

# a function is exported in the XML manifest
@function("str", "return user greeting")
@param("str", "name of user")
def hello(self, name):
return "Hi " + name

Now upload your extension to your Google App Engine account and voilà, anybody can now benefit from it!

To invoke from MindTouch Deki, just register your extension in the control panel. Now your users can access it by simply typing:

{{ hello("Bob") }}

To learn more how to write your own extensions using Google App Engine, check out the tutorial. Then drop by the developer forums to share your work, ask questions, and provide suggestions. Enjoy!

With all the discussions about about Cloud Computing going on, it’s time to draw lines and explain what the big differences are between Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Software.

SaaS: The dawn of Cloud Computing

SaaS has been attractive, because it removes all complexity from installation, deployment, maintenance, is globally accessible, and affordable. By its nature, SaaS resides in the “cloud” and overcomes the traditional headaches of VPNs for efficient collaboration. An added bonus is transparent backups (assuming there is backup strategy).

SaaS is great first step towards Cloud Computing, but it also has an important drawback: control. For all practical purposes, your data is not yours anymore. The SaaS vendor has full control over it; can mine it; and can lock you out of it. For consumers, this is generally not a problem, but for the enterprise, it is a concern.

In short with SaaS, the vendor is in control, not the customer. For the early days of Cloud Computing, that was an acceptable compromise, but times have changed and the cloud has evolved.

Cloud Software: The evolution of Cloud Computing

Cloud Software builds on Cloud Infrastructure (as described in this great post by our friends at RightScale). Similar to SaaS, Cloud Software provides instant gratification, taking mere minutes to be up and running. Depending on the vendor, Cloud Software is as easy to maintain and update as SaaS, and is of course globally accessible.

So what is the big difference? Your data and your application is sitting on servers that you control. There are no restrictions on moving data into or off your Cloud Infrastructure. These servers are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from servers in your physical data center.

What about backups? Cloud Software is designed to be run in the cloud. That means, it already addresses the need to replicate data repositories into the Cloud Storage fabric. Again, you control the Cloud Storage, so you can create additional copies of your data offline if you need to.

What about scaling? Cloud Software is designed to run on one to many machines. That means as your needs increase, you simply add more virtual infrastructure to the mix and voilà!

What about vendor lock-in? Cloud Software doesn’t really care what it runs on. With Cloud Infrastructure, all machines look the same, meaning you can move your application from one provider to another with few limitations. If need be, you can even move it back to your physical data center.

In short, with Cloud Software, the customer is back in control.

Is Cloud Software going to replace SaaS?

The short answers is “no” for the simple reason that SaaS works well when a single machine can services 1,000 to 100,000s of individual users, such as in a consumer setting. In the enterprise, however, Cloud Software has a big advantage. The premium to gain full control over your data and your infrastructure with Cloud Software is simply too low to give SaaS vendors the kind of control they have enjoyed so far. High value applications will transition to Cloud Software because customers want control, while SaaS will continue to supply free or low-cost applications and services.

This also reflects the different options for running MindTouch Deki Wiki. Wik.is is free for up 100MB (or $99/yr for 10GB) with no other restrictions, but the data reside on our servers. Alternatively, you can download Deki Wiki as a certified VMware image or from source code and install it on your servers. Or, you can get the best of both worlds, and launch a Deki Wiki EC2 instance directly in an Amazon.com data center in the cloud

It’s good to have choices!

Well, I know Matt says: “open source is all about…people” in this fabulous video he produced, but MHinkle made the soylent green reference and I’m trying to make use of that Discrete Math class I took in college that I don’t get much use out of now that I’m in management.

MindTouch needs your help to get Jott integrated with Deki Wiki. Jott converts your voice into emails, text messages, reminders, lists and appointments. They have integration with other applications like Twitter and Remember the Milk to name a few. Deki Wiki is being proposed as another option that they would offer with their sevice. This would allow a user to call their service and leave a message that would then be transcribed and posted to a wiki page. This is beneficial for anyone that wants to add comments or notes tied to Deki Wiki applications like project management, Knowledge Base, or any use of Deki Wiki where you’d like to capture information in the wiki when you are not at your computer. In order to have Deki Wiki considered for this we need you to send an email to them expressing your interest in an addition like this to their plugins. The email needs to be sent to feedback [at] jott [dot] com

Here is a sample email to use when emailing Jott:

Hello,

I use Deki Wiki and am interested in being able to use Jott with it. I understand that you accept ideas for Jott Links to connect Jott to existing Web Services. I’d like to nominate Deki Wiki for your next Jott Link extension. [feel free to add an example of how it would benefit you]

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

[your name]

We are seeking a self-motivated, enthusiastic Community Manager with a strong technical background to support our rapidly growing user community and external networks. As the Community Manager, you will be the catalyst for external communication, networking and events across our users, partners and other interested technology parties. As the product and user advocate across a broad and growing base, a thorough understanding of the processes and technologies used for web infrastructure, as well as superior communication and organizational skills are critical. As the primary interface to all users and prospective customers, the Community Manager will demonstrate the ability to exceed expectations in a fast paced, startup environment where he/she will be a valuable contributor to the company’s overall growth and success.

Responsibilities

• Maintain active community communication through newsletters, webinars, blogs, social media and forum posts
• Coordinate all efforts regarding the wiki, forums, blogs and similar community tools
• Provide strategy and thought leadership in external networks by actively listening and responding quickly to key partner, technology and user postings as well as developing deep networking relationships
• Drive the strategy and execution for expanding community activity and product adoption
• Organize and execute all community events including online events, community meetups and conferences
• Advocate community issues and product requests internally. Advise internal stakeholders of important trends and events in the community, using key data and statistics gathered from the community

Qualifications

• Experience with online communities and/or technical support for consumer web applications
• Technological knowledge and experience with web 2.0 applications including both consumer and enterprise technologies.
• Expertise using social media and consumer-driven content such as wikis, web feeds, blogs, forums, and podcasts
• Overall development experience using xml, php and C#.
• Strong organizational skills and attention to detail
• This role requires strong collaboration with marketing, engineering and support, so exceptional and demonstrated cross-group collaboration skills are required
• Other important strong skills include a passion for customers, strategic thinking and driving for results
• Ability to travel up to 10-15% for conferences
• Bachelors degree

Damien Howley
DamienH[at]mindtouch.com