A Quandry - seeking advice

#1

I am in a quandry and looking for some advice.

The project I have been working on has successfully gone through its prototype phase. This has shown that TIddlywiki is a suitable tool for the delivery of the content to regular users. We are now embarking on the pilot phase where we will enter a cohort of records, by volunteer users and test system procedures.

The reasons I advocated for Tiddlywki have proven to be good: its ease of configuring, simplicity of changing without necessitating reload of the information, ease of hiding the technical complexity, ability to refine the data model on the fly, etc. All good attributes. There are some not so good but none not so good so as to remove Tiddlywiki from contention.

My quandary is whether I am morally right in continuing to advocate for Tiddlywki when I know that, although the support via this group is excellent, on the ground support is very limited. In fact, in Australia, one might claim on ground support is missing. And who knows what the situation will be like in the future?

The project manager sees this as a 5 year project because it will depend on volunteers to come forward to enter the data into the final deliverable. Conversion from the current Microsoft Word files appears not viable because, as part of prototyping, they have decided to re-curate each record to extract out common content into a new type of record (think of it as a class record with many instances of the class, whereas now they just have instances. There will also now be many classes.) This re-curation requires understanding of the content and thus automated conversion is deemed not viable to my mind.

The question, given the recent discussions regarding the future of Tiddlywiki and backward compatibility, is - is Tiddlywiki a viable long-term candidate, will there be on ground support when I stop being involved?

There are other candidates, such as more ‘standard’ web options, like Wordpress and its ilk. I might reason that it will at least be possible to find Wordpress expertise in 5 years and as the web technologies change, there will be routes for migration to products down the line. I can not comfortably claim that for Tiddlywiki! For Tiddlywiki,any such migration would require considerable technical expertise.

So, I would like to hear from anone who might have some thoughts on this quandry. Would you be hesitant to condone Tiddlywiki for such a project? Do you know of any more likely candidates?

bobj

#2

As luck would have it here in Melbourne - My partner and I are in the process of setting up a strategic consulting company in IT and HR with a support group of about 100 employees (mostly in Perth) specialising in many aspects of web development and marketing. By mid-August I’m looking at offering a range of services from high-level solution architecture through to web and mobile app development.

I’d be very happy to help you develop your strategy in this regard so you can establish your options. My initial question is what you would see needed as “ground support” ?

I can understand the concern… I’ve tried a couple of “gig-economy” platforms like upWork for developing in Tiddlywiki - but despite developers having good javascript skills - it takes some learning curve to understand the platform well enough to support customisations , plugins etc. So it’s not easy finding expertise outside this forum that can dedicate support to your organisation.

That said, from a platform perspective, Tiddlywiki being open-source means that you will always have a working version available to host your content and a reasonably open format should you need to convert to another. The backwards compatibility discussion is also about a direction/balance needed to grow Tiddlywiki’s user base such that there is more likely support … and more capability is on its way with the multi-wiki server (MWS) etc.

On balance - I wouldn’t hesitate on using TW for your pilot (or possibly the 5yrs - depends on the approach)… I think having questions on the ongoing fit for purpose considerations, that the pilot will answer, is more key.

:slight_smile:

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#3

It is a quandry because although one may find support both in the community and from individuals like myself TiddlyWiki, does not drive a big ecosystem of qualified engeneers but then you need them less, and there is few trying to make money out of it.

  • It really can depend on the scale of the project.

One strength though is when designing such a solution it is quite easy to configure mechanisiums to export data in a structured way for easy migration to another service. For example one may use tiddlywiki to collect and clean the data then output it for input into any solution, including tiddlywiki.

  • I delivered a solution to an organisation once and it lasted a year or two, but I belive it did not continue a few years after I left, They got used to an inhouse solution, but no one was left to do it in house. Nor could they engage a professional with expertise (I was not available).
  • Ironicaly it is easier to leave tiddlywiki than most solutions as long as the detail is not in difficult areas, like my solution generated dynamic PDF’s and print handling is messy. If I was doing it over I may have used ePUB or something else as the output.

If I put my “open source independant and data soverenty hat on”, I would say tiddlywiki, if I was to put my “professional mainstream ICT contractor hat” on I may use it as a tool but not a final solution. So I think it depends on the orgnisations philosopy wether its a good fit.

#4

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this thread is perhaps bringing out the Aussies! So let me be the third Aussie to reply.

That out of the way…

That raises a couple of questions to me - what the ground support for TW is like in other countries? And how important is it that support be locally Australian vs the globally available support?

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#5

Some of the comments to my post require some explanation of what support might be required.

The first question, local vs off site.

The support could be off site since the TW is a hosted solution, albeit a single file hosted solution, and so anyone could provide the support from anywhere. The issue here is, how does the client access off site support? Possibly through this list but I would have thought too many support requests from naive users would not be acceptable on this list. Maybe there needs to be a separate list for support requests.

Secondly, the type of support.

I see this requirement similar to support for any system. Fix bugs, do amendments, upgrade versions, etc. over the first 5 years, as the PM expects mainly input of the data from the Microsoft Word files by volunteers, I would expect a large amount of the support would be supporting the volunteers in learning how to do what they need to do and answer basic level 1 support queries.

Thirdly, my involvement

Contrary to some ideas, I am a retired ICT person having over 50 years experience in this industry. It is just me, no company association. I am doing this job because I have much experience in digital archives and this is just one type of digital archive. However, my role will not be forever despite it being interesting content, from a historical perspective. I do provide IT support for another part of this organisation wherein I installed a TW procedures manual. This is going well, with the non TW users using it for several years now.

I have built a simple archive for the artwork of artist, Yvonne Boag (http://yvonneboag.com.au and follow the link to her artworks). This archive is built. From an earlier FileMaker Pro archive and I have created a simple dump and reload facility to get the content into the TW version for hosting online.

I posted this thread because I am feeling conflicted and was interested in what and how others are doing in this area of supporting TW in their environments. The conflict stems from knowing that TW can do the role but if I drop off the perch tomorrow, how could be client keep going after a significant, for them anyway, investment of time and money.

Thanks for all the comments so far, they are appreciated.

Bobj

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#6

Wow, four of us, @nemo . Maybe we should raise a flag and declare a colony :slight_smile:

Bobj

#7

Right & not.

Are you asking about helping folk create websites? Personal Wikis?

What are the desired outputs?
Are these needed by paying customers urgently?

That kinda question, first.

#8

No matter what product I choose today, there may be no support at all for it tomorrow.

Since it is the same for every product, then I ignore that criteria completely.

I go in with the mindset of: support for this will be non-existent tomorrow. Then the only thing that matters: how easily can I export the data I’ve put into it (say “it” is “system A”), so that I can import it into “system B” as part of migration from “system A” to “system B”.

Since I have no idea what import format “system B” will need, I want to know that I can export from “system A” to whatever format I believe is the lowest (most flexible) common denominator. (To me, that is a “comma-separated value” file. You might decide it is something else.)

The idea here is, no matter how excellent the TW solution is, to make that solution as disposable (throw-away) as possible so that if it must be replaced, the TW solution can be viewed as an excellent prototype that helped identify all needs/requirements for “system B”, while allowing for the creation of data that can be easily migrated to “system B”.

Whatever your concerns, not a single one of them turns any one of my remaining hairs any shade of gray.

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#9

If the long-term concern is data-gathering, then you might consider a hybrid solution, where you use a familiar web-form/online-spreadsheet or similar for non TW-savvy users to enter the data, and either regularly run a script to convert that format, or get your wiki to reach out to that document on load. That way, TW expertise is needed only to enhance your tool. Data entry volunteers, would need know nothing about it.

If you do build it in TW, it’s generally straightforward to export your data into formats useful to other tools. You might want to develop that early, and keep alongside your UI wiki a JSON or CSV extract of the same contents, suitable to build other interfaces atop, if people so desire.

#10

I already have with with the idea of Sydney TWIG - TiddlyWiki Interest group | Meetup which of course virtual events are posible Australia wide.

  • Perhaps we should start with a list of registered members.
  • Perhaps we can find a space within talk.tiddlywiki?
#11

Yes, I remember you floating the idea but heard nothin g since then. Was there any interest?

Bobj

#12

Lots the meetup has 50 members, however with my house sitting all over I have not pushed the events and built the community but others can help with this.

#13

I think that’s simplifying things a lot though. The more a product is used and more active developers there are, the less likely it is that everyone will abandon ship overnight (and the more likely that in such a rare instance, others will find it worth picking it up and continuing anyway). The same is not always true with a smaller project - especially one that is small in both developers and user count.

Looking at the export options is a good metric, and in that regard, I agree TW is excellent - with the only caveat I’d note being that TW data is trivial to export, but anything that utilises TW code would need translating. How relevant that is, is a per-project thing.