DokuWiki hackfest

The annual DokuWiki hackfest is on in a month or so. Wish I could go. Will do next year.

It’s going to be held in the brilliant-sounding LinuxHotel in Essen, Germany, from Monday 29 July to Sunday 4 August.

There’s been a bit of stuff written lately about grumpy meanness and less-than generous interactions in various open-source communities, and I certainly agree with some of that. I’ve experienced it in some places, but certainly never in the DokuWiki world. Everyone seems just rather normal there, and friendly. (Some of the terseness in the Kohana forums, for example, isn’t! Not that collaboration doesn’t need critique, but it also needs kindness.)

Last year’s hackfest sounds like it would’ve been fun. A chap from Southeastern Railway said:

The Hackfest is just starting to wind down and as the only ‘user’ here for the whole weekend it has been a fascinating experience. I am the host on this occasion and we are a big user of Dokuwiki which is the core application in our technical document management system, some 40,000 pages and 20,000 images.

I have been involved with technical document management for many years, in both aviation and rail. DokuWiki is the first really successful document management application I’ve implemented. Our user base has taken to it with ease and we continue to find new and innovative things we can do with the software.