Mandriva Club V2 beta - a foundation for a new generation of services to Club members!

During recent months, many of you have expressed remarks, suggestions or grievances related to the current Club infrastructure. As we always hope to meet expectations, we have worked hard on designing a brand new Club platform which is now available as a beta test at the following URL: http://club-beta.mandriva.com.

The new platform for now contains roughly the same services as are on the original Club and is a first step in unifying all Club related services. It also features some new or improved modules, organized in "webs" in the wiki terminology:

• Blog space allowing Bronze, Silver, Gold members to have their blog online on the Mandriva Club -> ask for a blog now!
• Club Contributors web for people who'd like to take part in the design of future Club services. Current hot topics are: a new collaboratively maintained hardware compatibility list system, the license for the knowledge base content, designing a catalogue for describing available applications in a friendly way, Club rich desktop app and more.
• Multilingual knowledge base, for getting rid of those unmanageable 'Fr', 'De' etc suffixes
• Improved mirror list module
• Latin American web: this web will contain news and information specifically related to the Mandriva Latin American community!

The new Club platform is based on XWiki, a 3G wiki system. We are greatly indebted to the XWiki team, who have designed a software that brings web-enabled collective intelligence capabilities to a new level. Ludo, Luis, Vincent, Jeremy: thank you! The platform is also built on MySQL and Apache Jakarta Tomcat.

From now on, ClubV2 will phase in while ClubV1 will phase out, and we will keep the two Clubs online until we entirely switch to ClubV2. The PhpBB forums will remain unchanged for now. Besides, several new multilingual forums are available within ClubV2 for discussing the platform itself and for expressing global wishes. We're aware some work remains to be done before production stage and we will strive to reach the required quality level as soon as possible. The platform will also undergo a performance boost during June with the arrival of new servers. ClubV1 and ClubV2 user data will get synchronised every day. Regarding the articles, the idea would be to publish them first on ClubV2 in wiki syntax, then to publish them also on ClubV1. Same idea for translations.

"Users are builders"

The design of the new Club was humbly inspired by remarks contained in these excellent articles:

• Customers as Innovators: A New Way To Create Value - Eric Von Hippel
• Sharing and Creating Knowledge in Open-Source Communities - Andrea Hemetsberger, Christian Reinhardt

Happy wiki-ing on the new Club!

Club Team