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diff --git a/doc/history.md b/doc/history.md index 32917712f..7360c6b22 100644 --- a/doc/history.md +++ b/doc/history.md @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@ -Redmatrix History -================= +Hubzilla History +================ -Redmatrix is a collaborative effort by the Redmatrix community and based on work introduced in Friendica by the Friendica community. The core design, the project mission, and software base itself were created/written primarily by Mike Macgirvin and represent the culmination of over a decade of software design using variations of this platform and an evolving vision of the role of communication software in our lives. Many others have contributed to this work, both conceptually and in terms of actual code (way too many to list individually). +Hubzilla is a community developed open source project based on work introduced in Friendica by the Friendica community and which previously was named Redmatrix. The core design, the project mission, and software base itself were created/written primarily by Mike Macgirvin and represent the culmination of over a decade of software design using variations of this platform and an evolving vision of the role of communication software in our lives. Many others have contributed to this work, both conceptually and in terms of actual code (far too many to list individually). ##Mike Macgirvin -- Biography @@ -10,9 +10,9 @@ Mike Macgirvin is an American software engineer now living in Australia. He spen During a layoff round, Mike was let go from America Online in August 2001 and purchased a music store in Mountain View, California later to be known as "Sonica Music Company". Opening a retail store for non-essential goods at the beginning of a prolonged economic downturn was in retrospect probably not the wisest career move. Sonica eventually folded; in late 2006. Mike returned to working on software and systems support full-time and was employed briefly at Symantec before moving to Australia in early 2007. He currently lives on a farm "out in the middle of nowhere" and is employed as a Computer Systems Officer at the University of Wollongong. -##Redmatrix - The Early Years +##Hubzilla - The Early Years -The software which went into creating Redmatrix has been through three distinct historical phases. It began in 2003 when Mike Macgirvin was looking for a content management system to power the website for his music store and found the available solutions to be lacking in various respects. The project was born as the "PurpleHaze weblog" under the nom de plume "Nerdware Communications". It was a multi-user PHP/MySQL CMS which provided blogs, forums, photo albums, events and more. Initially it provided the basis for a social community and shopping for customers of the store, but was also linked to Mike's personal weblog running on another domain. The distinguishing characteristic of this software was the ability for so-called "normal users" to re-assemble the components and choose different content feeds - and in essence create their own personal "multi-user CMS" as a view. Their custom view was able to communicate with anybody else that used the system, but could be partitioned so that adult sites and motorcycle enthusiast sites would not be visible to each other and not clash (or in this case Mike's personal website and the music store website). This software was developed primarily from 2003 until 2008. +The software which went into creating Hubzilla has been through several distinct historical phases. It began in 2003 when Mike Macgirvin was looking for a content management system to power the website for his music store and found the available solutions to be lacking in various respects. The project was born as the "PurpleHaze weblog" under the nom de plume "Nerdware Communications". It was a multi-user PHP/MySQL CMS which provided blogs, forums, photo albums, events and more. Initially it provided the basis for a social community and shopping for customers of the store, but was also linked to Mike's personal weblog running on another domain. The distinguishing characteristic of this software was the ability for so-called "normal users" to re-assemble the components and choose different content feeds - and in essence create their own personal "multi-user CMS" as a view. Their custom view was able to communicate with anybody else that used the system, but could be partitioned so that adult sites and motorcycle enthusiast sites would not be visible to each other and not clash (or in this case Mike's personal website and the music store website). This software was developed primarily from 2003 until 2008. In 2006 this software was used as the prototype for Symantec's "safeweb" reputation and community site. It was developed and enhanced until about 2008. A rewrite took place in 2008 named "Reflection" but work stagnated as the community dwindled. The need for content management systems and communications software dropped dramatically during this time as humans flocked to the new social aggregrators - Facebook and Twitter. @@ -44,7 +44,13 @@ The concept of identity-aware content was alien to anything that existed previou Over time a few federation components re-emerged. The ability to view RSS feeds was important to many people. Diaspora never really managed to re-write their protocol, so that was re-implemented and allowed Redmatrix to connect with Diaspora and Friendica again (Friendica still had their Diaspora protocol intact, so this was the most common language now remaining on the free web - despite its faults). Diaspora communications aren't able to make use of the advanced identity features, but they work for basic communications. -Mike stepped down as active coordinator for the project in early 2015. +##Hubzilla + +The Redmatrix project reached a point of stagnation in early 2015 as network growth leveled and active interest in the project declined. Mike met with several external high tech developers and innovators in a round of discussions that were called "Zotopia" in early 2015 to perform an independent review of the project and try to identify what had gone wrong and plan a route forward. The basic consensus is that the project suffered from bad marketing decisions which were compounded by mixed messages about the project goals and target audience. A "rival" project (Diaspora) was marketing itself as a Facebook competitor, but after some long discussions it was determined that Redmatrix wasn't a Facebook competitor at all, and too much emphasis was being placed on the "social network" and "anti-Facebook" features. It was a novel decentralisation platform with distributed identity and permissions, and as was pointed out, the "end user" was the wrong target market. These marketing mistakes were now identified with the project name and random sampling of various "customers" showed that none of them really had a clue about the software goals or target market segment. The mixed messages were associated with the brand identity and this was a problem. + +The Redmatrix community held a vote and the project was renamed "Hubzilla", with a renewed identity and focus - to provide software for creating and ultimately linking together unrelated community websites or "hubs" into a global community. This is in fact what we were building all along, but didn't fully recognise it. The target audience for this software as it turns out is not the members or end users, but software integrators and digital community architects and builders. These in turn will be responsible for marketing their own product (their respective online communities) to end-users or members. The software solves a real world need of linking isolated and "walled garden" community sites together into a larger cooperative. The transition from Redmatrix to Hubzilla was complex and has taken several months as we consolidated the marketing and media assets to deliver a consistent message. It is still ongoing at this time, and should be completed in Q4 2015. + +Mike stepped down as active coordinator for the project in early 2015 and turned management over to the community. He remains active as a Hubzilla developer. #include doc/macros/main_footer.bb; |