Anca Luca

XWiki is a structured wiki engine developed as Open Source since 2004, providing wiki-style collaboration for organizations, with many built-in features and countless extensions. XWiki has pioneered wikis by including structured data on the same level as free text content, thus enhancing significantly the expressiveness of the built knowledge bases; this same usage is also popularized by Confluence and Notion, with different user experience choices and more importantly with business models that are keeping user's data locked-in on the Cloud or in proprietary software.

In this talk we will present XWiki's journey to provide the best FOSS alternative to proprietary knowledge management tools, based on both current features and future roadmap.

We will showcase XWiki's approach for collaboration on text & structured data, including the newly conceived "livedata" component for inline editing of structured tabular data as well as the new realtime editor based on the realtime editing technology from CryptPad.

Two years ago I showed how to use XWiki as a development platform to build collaborative content centric applications while last year I did a short demo about how to use XWiki to setup a collaborative intranet in just 20 minutes. This year I propose a demo about how to create a public website with XWiki, and use XWiki like a content management system (but a collaborative one). The appeal of XWiki for such a usage is the possibility to integrate all usages in a single tool (intranet - see last year's talk - or any other content centric collaborative platform - see the talk from 2 years ago), while not completely missing the presentation features of "classical" content management systems.

Sharing knowledge in a team of people working together (company, association, study group or any other kind of project) is key for its long-term success. Even if this is not properly identified from the beginning as a main concern, setting up tools and processes that allow knowledge to be accumulated and organized correctly ends up being on the TODO list at some point, and may come with the wish to have done it earlier. Thus, the best solution is one that is quick enough to setup from the very beginning and versatile enough to be able to incrementally develop into a proper solid fortress of knowledge.

In this presentation I will use the XWiki platform to incrementally build a collaborative intranet from scratch and will try to address some frequent needs of knowledge sharing in a team, using already-made add-ons or new tools (list not exhaustive): * Blog, for unidirectional communication, * Meeting notes, for spoken knowledge not to be lost, * File Manager for just dropping files to share, * Task manager for lightweight ticketing, * Holiday requests and Recruitment applications for team management, * Unstructured free content sharing, using standard wiki pages and page templates, * Structured content tailored to fit your exact specific needs, * Multi-wiki separation for teams isolation, * Powerful search in all this, * Authentication add-ons to plug your own users management, * Easy look & feel setup, to brand it as your own.

XWiki's advanced features for structuring data and scripting in wiki pages make it suitable for developing applications of various sizes, for various needs. The wiki principle make all these applications collaborative by default, while the multiple UI configuration options and permission system allow to show as much or as little of it as needed for the specific case . In this talk I will explain the usage of XWiki through the angle of comparing its usage with the development of applications from scratch. I will explain and demo the various features of the XWiki platform and how they can be assembled together to create applications and show some examples of such work that was done for professional accounts (e.g. https://nosdemarches.gouv.fr ).

Open Food Facts is a free, online and crowdsourced database of food products from around the world, licensed under the Open Database License (ODBL). It was launched in 2012, and today it is powered by 5000 contributors who have collected data and images for over 380 000 products in 178 countries.

Scan a product using your phone, take a picture, and you're already part of the Open Food Facts revolution !

In this talk we'll show how Open Food Facts leverages open source technologies such as Perl, MongoDB, Pastec.io, Android, Swift as well as the great power of communities to open data of public interest for health & science, as well as unforeseen applications in your daily life.

We will also introduce you to the recently launched Open Beauty Facts, for freeing your cosmetic cupboard: shampoos, toothpastes, lipsticks, etc.

How does it work?

Using our Android or iPhone app, you can easily scan the barcode of products from your home or local stores, to either check them out at a glance (thanks to the decoding and comparison tools) or to contribute them by uploading pictures of their labels. The same can also be done from the website, where additional tools are available to fill in the product details from the labels, navigate the database based on various criteria, make statistics and chart visualisations, or access APIs and raw data to make your own tools and analyses.

Open all the way

Open Food Facts is developed and managed by a community of open source, open data and food enthusiasts and is organised as a non-profit association. All its creations are open:

• the collected data is published as Open Data,
• the software running the server(s) is open source and reusable (it was also used to create the Open Beauty Facts database),
• the mobile applications are open source as well.