The focus was quite technical – not sure if the “suits” in the room (there aren’t normally many at a BostonPHP meeting, but there were a few this time) really expected such a deep dive – and made you appreciate the herculean effort it takes to mount a sustained campaign like that one.

You can listen to the podcast version of the presentation, see some photos and check out Elena’s notes – she managed to capture the great majority of the details they shared.

The topic was MediaWiki in production, with presentations by Greg Rundlett of Harvard’s Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) and Daniel Barrett, who wrote the (O’Reilly) book on MediaWiki, and uses it in production at VistaPrint.

Greg Rundlett presents at BostonPHP

Dan Barrett gets ready to present at BostonPHP

Greg’s presentation, appropriately enough, is in the format of a MediaWiki page. He provided an overview of wikis in general as well as some of the other activites of the MediaWiki Foundation, then got right into details of MedaWiki syntax, built in features, and plugins.

Daniel Barrett’s presentation (which he was kind enough to send to me and allow me to post – thanks Dan) focused more on how to deploy a successful wiki, including six lessons:

1. It’s not about the technology
2. Know the strengths and weaknesses of the platform
3. Know the culture of the enterprise
4. Pre-structure the wiki and write stubs
5. Integrate with legacy systems
6. Measure your results

There was also good time for Q & A at the end, including a number of questions that were as much about corporate culture as technology: how to handle “potentially dangerous” procedures, how to deal with employees who horde information in search of job security, and the like.

Looking forward to next month’s BostonPHP which will be Jesse Burns facilitating a “PHP IDE Bakeoff” – February 11th, 6:30 pm, at Optaros Boston (More detail on Meetup.com – please RSVP if you plan to attend).

Tuesday night Mike Krigsman (twitter.com/mkrigsman) organized a “tweetup” at the Boston Beer Works in the Fenway. I won’t try to list all the attendees, but a few notes on folks I talked to:

• Silona (twitter.com/silona) was in town from Austin (League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, We Are All Actors)
• Met Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (twitter.com/pistachio) – now I won’t be just another face in the crowd of her ~1500 twitter followers
• Met David Fisher (twitter.com/tibbon) who works with Nate at Jazkarta
• Nathan Burke (BlogString, twitter.com/?), who works with Michelle at MatchMine
• Met Jack Vinson (twitter.com/jackvinson) from Aspen Technology, who lives in the Boston area despite his Twitter account saying he is in Evanston IL.

I also met Dan Bricklin, which is really a brush with greatness. (No offense to my fellow tweetup attendees, but dude basically invented the spreadsheet).

Not bad for a tweetup on Super Tuesday (also Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday), in not so great Boston weather. Apologies in advance if I left anyone out – I did have to run out early to catch a train.

Last night (wednesday) was the February BostonPHP meeting, on “Choosing a FOSS License for your project.”

Karen Copenhaver and Ira Heffan presented, but it was less about formal presentation and was really a conversation with the whole group – we talked about different classes of licenses and degrees of reciprocity they encourage/require, GPLv3 versus Affero GPLv3, CPAL, etc. The audio was recorded and will probably turn up as a podcast shortly.

After the meeting Mark Withington, Ira Heffan, Greg Rundlett and I went out for drinks and talked about life, the universe, and everything. ;)

Tonight, I’m headed to the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport – although this means missing out on Silona’s presentation to the Berkman Thursday Blog Group.

Sheesh. So much to do, so little time. Good to see a vibrant local community.