Emily Chang - eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews »»

eHub Interviews SWiK

Thanks to Alex Bosworth, creator of SWiK for this email interview posted November 9, 2005.

eHub: What is your web application/service about?

SWiK: SWiK is a community resource for open technology. You can gather notes or write howtos and share them or work on them with others. Adding and relating open source projects is really simple, SWiK finds information about any project automatically from the internet. Pages are also automatically related to each other, so you can make a page on your personal SWiK user page or syndicate your blog on SWiK and your posts will appear on pages about topics you reference.

eHub: Why did you start this project?

SWiK: SourceLabs started SWiK as a way to provide a service to the open source community, and to help fix the problem of hard to use open source software. SWiK’s goal is to make it easy to collaborate with other developers and users of open source software to gather and communicate knowledge about using or developing software based on open technologies.

eHub: How much time do you devote to its growth?  Do you have a day job?

SWiK: SWiK is my day job, I spend almost all my time working on it.

eHub: How large is your team and what are your backgrounds?

SWiK: The other members of my team are Marc Wandschneider and Jerry Kuch. My background as far as I can reveal is in rich web apps, Marc has recently written a book on developing in PHP and describes his background: “Born in the steppes of Inner Mongolia, Marc Wandschneider was sold to Horse Traders at the tender age of two months and ending up being raised by Tibetan Yak herders soon after”. Jerry is the brains of the operation.

Marc and Jerry are developers and I’m a program manager.

eHub: What is your design philosophy?

SWiK: Our design philosophy is release early and release often and see what people make of it, we’re very user-activity oriented. We also strive to be very open, supporting open standards and publishing content under creative commons and via xml.

eHub: What technologies are you currently using?

SWiK: We are using heavily Ajax, CSS, PHP, Ruby to power our pages, with MySQL backend, and some Java for RSS feed retrieval. We also integrate Google and del.icio.us to find information about projects from the web.

eHub: If your project is live, what are the most requested features from your users/community?

SWiK: Our most requested features are more ways to browse and search through our pages, beyond the organizational tagging that we support.

eHub: Does your user base reside in a primary geographic location or is it distributed?

SWiK: Our user base is extremely diversified, we have a lot of visitors from China and South America especially. Open source is very much a global effort, and our visitors reflect that.

eHub: Where do you see the project heading in the next 6 months?  The next 2 years?

SWiK: In the next 6 months we want to refine and leverage the cool pages/tagging framework we have built, and work on growing a community of users that are interested in open collaboration, plus fill in some of the most requested features that people are asking for and introduce some really cool ones people might not expect.

In the next 2 years we have big plans for increased integration and collaboration with other community sites.

eHub: What is the greatest challenge to your success?

SWiK: Our greatest challenge to success is getting the word out about SWiK, and letting people know about how they can use SWiK to help navigate the world of open source and open technology.

eHub: What is the one thing you need to get to the next phase of the project?

SWiK: We need people to come help other users of open source technology and build useful information about using open source or open technologies.

eHub: Do you have a business model?  If so, what is it?

SWiK: SourceLabs business model is providing premium support for open source to enterprise IT organizations, the SWiK project supports that goal by helping open source succeed and continue to grow as a critical part of application development.

eHub: What is the one thing you’re most proud of about the project?

SWiK: I’m most proud of the way that we look at user’s free tagging to figure out the relationships between every open source project. Browsing through SWiK it’s really interesting to see what a wealth of great open source projects are out there. We’ve also pushed the envelope on integration with web services and making it seamless with Ajax.

eHub: How would you describe the shift that’s occurring with the web right now to future generations?

SWiK: The web right now is reinventing itself as a complete replacement for desktop computing, with the advantages of cross platform and integrated collaboration.

eHub: What site(s) do you visit everyday other than your own?

SWiK: del.icio.us, bloglines, google, digg.com, gmail, tadalist, wikipedia, imdb, livemarks, blogsearch.google

eHub: How many hours of sleep do you get a night?

SWiK: 5-6 while pushing to get features out on SWiK.

Thanks to Alex Bosworth, creator of SWiK for this email interview posted November 9, 2005.

Visit SWiK
Originally added to eHub on Oct 04, 05

» More eHub Interviews

eHub Interviews is a series with the creators of Web 2.0 applications and services by Emily Chang, author of eHub, designer, and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a strategic web consultancy in San Francisco that she co-founded with Max Kiesler.

Also see eHub Interviews in Japanese at CNET Japan