As Pieter mentioned in the previous post, I am stepping in as a person-in-charge at Wikidot. Pieter has been leading the project for a long time (he came on-board not more than a year after Wikidot.com launched) and now he is moving to his other promising projects. During past months Wikidot benefited from several great contributions and improvements by Pieter, and I believe what Wikidot is now is undeniably also thanks to Pieter's engagement. Thanks and good luck!
The decision we made was a difficult one, and based on several factors, both product- and business-oriented. Although I can firmly call Wikidot a successful project in many aspects, it still needs a lot of work in many areas. We will be presenting ideas to our Community and we are counting on your help and creative feedback.
For sure, our whole Wikidot Team here in Toruń will keep working hard. Or even harder. This is guaranteed, because this is exactly how we made Wikidot where it is now, in both popularity and maturity — through a lot of work and passion for creating web tools. We are going to focus a bit more on simplifying and optimizing most commonly used features and lowering the barriers for new users who start using Wikidot. But we will also continue working on things that we started, including advanced features for our tech-savvy users.
But most importantly, we want to be as much as possible transparent to our users — you altogether have created far more websites using Wikidot than us, therefore we value your opinion really high. We have learned that communicating with our users is a key role to success of Wikidot, and we will try hard to continue our work in this direction.
Thanks for using Wikidot and good luck to you all!
Regards,
Michał Frąckowiak, founder and CEO of Wikidot.com
Keep up the good work! Also for the "savvies".
A - S I M P L E - P L A N by ARTiZEN a startingpoint for simple wikidot solutions.
Pieter set the bar pretty high in this regard. You have some really big Wikidot fans and maintaining or even growing what Pieter started, especially with this blog, will be important in my opinion.
I appreciate all that you and your development team has done and I'm looking forward to the days ahead.
-Ed
Community Admin
I'm sad to see Pieter go. He was great for Wikidot. After experimenting with several other wiki hosts, I truly believe Wikidot offers the best experience to its users. I truly appreciate how versatile Wikidot is and how much control it gives its users. Transparency has been outstanding. Keep up the great work! I love Wikidot.
Welcome back to the spotlight Michal. If you can make life easier for new users that will be a very good thing. I'm looking forward to see how the blog evolves with you running the show - if I was you I wouldn't try and slavishly follow Pieter's model, but I do think it is an important communication tool you should continue using.
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
Best of luck Michal. Never forget, we are right behind you (no, not with a knife!) and look forward to what's coming next for Wikidot.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.
I hope you really do seek and consider community feedback. That wasn't happening much before Pieter came along, and it would be a terrible shame if the collaboration that has been built up since is reduced. I disagreed with Pieter vehemently on countless occasions, but there's no question in my mind that the way he both engaged with the community, and fairly considered their feedback was unprecedented for wikidot, AND that brought unprecedented benefit to Wikidot as a organization.
I wish you luck michal, but I can't imagine how you'll both maintain the pace of productive development you've held in recent months (which I commend you and the rest of Wikidot's dev team for) AND engage with the community at all in order to benefit from our ideas. I look forward to hearing your plans.
My thoughts excactly. I'm trying not to be too skeptical (people are usually afraid of changes), but it's difficult to imagine how someone could handle two time-consuming jobs.
As the main developer, I guess there are more than enough things to do. The time "chatting with the community" (as Pieter expressed in the previous post) is taken off from the "real work", developing Wikidot. If I was Michal, I maybe hired a reliable person to communicate with the community (perhaps the best improvement ideas come from the actual users?) and give him "superduper status" (as Pieter expressed) for reclaiming site names, getting rid of spam sites, handling bug reports and other community requests.
These are just my thoughts, I'm sure you people at Wikidot know better than me what's the best way to act. Right now you're the best (a big thanks to Michal for creating this service) and I'm confident that it will stay that way.
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
… with your new responsibilities. I expect all will go well based on all the work you have done to date!
Hey michal,
Do you plan to continue using this blog?
The way I see it, the best way to continue with the community interaction is to focus on:
As I once told Pieter, I look forward to reading the blog posts here. That will not change, even with a different author.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Oh frack1, I keep coming up with a bunch of other important sites… you have a lot of work on your hands with pieter gone xD
There is also http://site-name.wikidot.com/ .. and a couple of others I thought of last night but have now forgotten.
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
Welcome Michal…
I just hope you will be as omnipresent as Pieter was… It was really nice to know that if you have a problem it will be solved, or at least attended in a matter of hours….
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
I agree. I have long thought that Wikidot should have a Comms Manager. Fortunately that became much less crucial in the last few months due to Pieter's regular blogs, forum presence and general good communications.
I really wish Michal the best and hope that he is able to juggle the development work with the very important role of communicating. We shall see, and we do need to give him some time to settle back in to this role. But I suspect that the need for a Comms Manager has re-surfaced. It would need to be someone who can also communicate with Michal and has an "in" to the development team, so it's not an easy person to find.
Rob Elliott - Strathpeffer, Scotland - Wikidot first line support & community admin team.