Foundation of the WikiRing

We have been busy recently setting up the WikiRing.com site. ``We'' that is Crawford Currie, Sven Dowideit, Lynnwood Brown, Will Norris and I. We all have been contributing to the TWiki project for years now and still are. One day Sven said: ``Hey let's be more efficient and form a power base to get rich and famous!'' (rephrased). And I instantly found that to be a good idea. So we called the thing the WikiRing.

Adding paid consulting services on top of our open source activities is a natural thing to do and quite some people are doing that already. The difference is that we've come together knowing the high quality of each others work and the belief that -- as a team -- we are able to negotiate much bigger and more interesting projects than each of us could do on its own working in isolation. WikiRing partners work together in a much tighter way than it is the case otherwise. Mutual expertise helps to reduce business risks in any phase of a project. Being perceived as a consultant organized in a partnership is of value in its own as there are companies that prefer to outsource a job to a group instead of some single guy.

The idea is that WikiRing partners have access to the shared WikiRing resources and its solution database. This in itself is a project of its own: building a business platform to integrate (a) customer relationship, (b) showcases, (c) research & development and (d) a job market place where jobs acquired by partners are traded among each other. Depending on the assignments partners group in varying roles by subcontracting each other. When things continue to grow we will add mechanisms to collect incentives from customers as well as among partners themselves which will make more sense the more partners will join the WikiRing.

We will invite more people to join the WikiRing on a subscription base. As things are right now we start as a rather small group to get things right and ensure a healthy growth. As we five initially launched the WikiRing each of us has a kind of senior partner status with additional rights and duties. Senior partners constitute the inner ring taking special care about the WikiRing brand. A normal partner will have fewer votes in decision processes and not necessarily be responsive for shared resources. Distinguishing two classes of partners sounds odd first and ``non-democratic'' but we belief that this is essential to scale up an undertaking like this. So the number of senior partners will always stay comparably low.

We have a fairly wide radius being situated in very different parts of the world (GB, USA, Mexico, Australia, Germany) and thus are present around the clock in different timezones. The wiki segment is expanding vastly recently, so let's have a fraction of it. But greediness only comes second, though marginally. First we'd like to provide high quality solutions. That's what they all say in the beginning. Be warned: we just started, expect us to grow ... and get sloppy.