2010/10/26 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
Gmail is just ridiculously better than any other email
client I've
ever used ever, having previously progressed through Pine, elm, mutt
and Thunderbird. Perhaps it's just me, but I'd guess otherwise from
the number of Wikimedians with gmail,com addresses.
free
Google Docs is ridiculously usable for real-time collaboration. More
so than anything I've ever used.
I suggest it's quite plausible that the Google versions are so far
ahead of self-hosted open source equivalents that we'd be crippling
ourselves.
That's the gist of it. Our general policy is to be as open on internal
tools as reasonably possible, which includes giving people an Ubuntu
laptop even if they've only ever seen that name on a restaurant in
Napa. [1] It also includes pretty substantial investment in some open
tools where we can make a significant difference through our adoption
and support, e.g. CiviCRM.
We've still got lots of Macs, but are gradually moving away from them
where we can; we've standardized on
OpenOffice.org (soon LibreOffice?)
for formatting documents, and of course we use wikis extensively for
sustained collaboration. I've started a page a while ago to publicly
document the internal tools use of WMF and other players in the
Wikimedia movement:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FLOSS-Exchange
We've recommended Thunderbird in the past (with some folks sticking
with GMail, yours truly included), but unfortunately it doesn't meet
all our needs. We're reluctantly switching to GMail as the standard
email solution, but we'd love to switch to an open solution in future.
Jon Davis can elaborate a bit on the assessment process. Naturally
folks will be able to continue to use open source clients.
Google Docs is a great collaborative drafting tool (as is Etherpad,
which is open), but I don't want us to become dependent on it -- for
any document that needs to be worked on over sustained periods of
time, it ends up being moved out of GD. I'd love to see at least a
basic MediaWiki/Etherpad integration, it would give MW a huge
productivity boost for real-time note-taking and collaboration.
[1]
http://www.yelp.com/biz/ubuntu-restaurant-and-yoga-studio-napa
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge:
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