the XWiki TeamXWiki's 2018 Events Season started with the participation at FOSDEM, the biggest free Open Source event in Europe, where communities can meet, share ideas and collaborate.
The XWiki SAS team, from both the Paris and Iasi offices, was present for 2 days in Brussels, between February 3rd and 4th. We participated with presentations in six different tracks, tackling the different hot subjects from new features, compatibility, and integration with other tools and services, lessons learned from deployments, surveys, research and development, legal issues and Artificial Intelligence.
During this event, we shared the stand called Wikis and CMS with our friends from Tiki and WikiSuite. We are very happy to have shared ideas, plans for the future and the promise to meet again with the other Open Source communities. The official number of attendees is still unknown, but we must say it was a great year - we talked to a lot of people about XWiki and gave away almost all our goodies.
Managing an Open Source enterprise
Our CEO, Ludovic Dubost, presented XWiki: a case study on managing corporate and community interests based on 14 years of Open Source in a small company. The presentation focused on how XWiki SAS has been able to build XWiki as Open Source, and also launch the CryptPad project while keeping an honest open community and a fair Open Source model.
Later the same day, Ludovic returned and posed the question of financing Open Source software and how they live without being bought. XWiki has been able to self-finance writing Open Source code and sharing it with the community for 14 years now. Ludovic Dubost has shared what worked and what didn't, what went easy and was proven to be difficult, what is tricky in keeping the Open spirit and what is miraculous about the journey!
XWiki and CryptPad
An interesting talk, from Vincent Massol, our CTO, answered the following question: What if there was a way to have long tail apps developed and working in just a few minutes? He demonstrated how a next generation wiki platform allows to do just that by using the XWiki open source project. See his presentation below.
Caleb James DeLisle's talk presented the encryption and key-management model, the sandboxing architecture which prevents a majority of CryptPad code from accessing the secret keys and some research into a solution to prevent backdoors in the javascript sent from the server. You can also learn how to reuse the CryptPad architecture (and source code) in developing other security/privacy-conscious webapps if you play the video until the end:
Privacy Policy
When we're not all about code and the product, our colleagues debate tough subjects like Artificial Intelligence dealing with the right to be forgotten. Tune in to see Cristina Rosu tackle the subject from all perspectives: concept, juridical nature, doctrine debates regarding this notion and also how does it interfere with artificial intelligence.
Development and user experience
Vincent Massol talked about advanced testing practices used by the XWiki open source project, and using Java, Maven, Docker and Jenkins. You can check his presentation here:
Software platforms need to be highly extensible and customizable, since developers need to build on top of them and provide the best experience for users. Some users put more focus on the styling and visual aspect of their customization, others need it to be highly accessible or responsive, while others just like to have diversity in their choices. Ecaterina Moraru deals with all of them and shares her experience below.
