On TiddlyWiki solutions crowdfunding

#1

Folks,

I am currently needing to find an income, and sadly this may mean moving away from my focus on tiddlywiki. If I can secure even a partial income and the potential for more, I may be able to stay with a TiddlyWiki Focus. Others may also be in my situation.

I understand Jeremy himself is interested in building this aspect of our community.

I thought I may frankly share what I am thinking, for feedback.

I feel I have the capacity to build and develop solutions for the community, business and individuals, however I can’t justify so much of my time without some kind of income in my life. If I can find a part time job I would.

Please read this post and comment if

  • you are interested in a TiddlyWIki funding ecosystem
  • you would like to be able to fund solutions in TiddlyWiki
  • you would like to seek income from TiddlyWiki yourself.

Background

Around five years ago I was retrenched from a 12+ year position. Since them I have done a little consulting work, but have done a lot to build on TiddlyWiki, deal with covid lockdowns and some health issues. Funding myself from my equity in a mortgage, the time has come for me to “return to the market”.

For some years I have built my tiddlywiki skills as a superuser/designer without entering the world of javascript code development, I chose to do this so that I can represent the “tiddlywiki user” and I was not so inclined to add things to tiddlywiki, when there may already exist the ability to achieve it, using what is already available. I do use node but I tend to focus on single file wikis. This in truth places me right at the edge of the user/designer and the Developer/coder communities and as a result I see the values and barriers that exist between these groups.

My focus has being on building a “rapid solutions environment” rather than finished products, with the exception of my own personal and business wikis. As a result I have a mounting number of tools to support TiddlyWiki development and design, as well as a range of enhancements that address common user and designer needs.

I have also pushed every apparent limitation I come across in TiddlyWiki and contributed to the discussion and development of solutions. Quite a few of these things seem to influence the developers and lots of features and functionality have being added to TiddlyWiki (along with everyone’s efforts). I am Pushing the limits of TiddlyWIki with the view to developing innovative approaches to advanced uses. I have developed many “Proof of Concepts” (POCs) to this end and have built a comprehensive skill set around TiddlyWiki.

Further to my own development I have scoured and reviewed as many plugins, demos and tricks within the community to develop a deep understanding of TiddlyWiki which I would also like to share back, even more than my existing forum contributions.

I have not formally published many of these tools, solutions and innovations, however I have withheld nothing as you may know, I participate a lot in the forums such as Google Groups and now Discourse, to help grow and develop the community and tiddlywiki’s applications. It is in the forums many of my ideas and solutions have been informally published.

My Vision

I would like to be able to seek crowdfunding and support, to both fund and upvote items the community most needs, be it funding specific solutions or tools. Or alternatively a generic contribution that would allow me to publish publicly many of my tools. I have hundreds (300+) stored in JSON files ready to go the next step, to broad sharing and publishing to the community and if necessary bespoke solutions by commission.

Other approaches include

  • To receive funding commitments and if sufficient funds are raised to a target amount, deliver the result.
  • Subscription based access to prototypes, influencing the project and early access to published content. This may also include white label solutions customised into bespoke solutions.

It seems to me if I have the correct platform which would allow crowdfunding or commissions we would see if the market and community are prepared to contribute.

The philosophical questions

  • We all contribute much to the community for free already, I would not want to diminish this, so except for bespoke commissions, most of my “products” would ultimately be made available to our “open source community”.
  • As with everyone else I would still want to call on the community for support, and as a result continue to share back advances made while responding to a crowd, group or individually funded activity.
  • I would in no way want to limit anyone else’s capacity to take the same approach as myself, there are quite a few people here who are extremely productive and also deserving of financial reward, however it may be easier for me to start in my own ecosystem, rather than trying to start with a global ecosystem (perhaps later I can generalise it with the community)
  • Because many before me have published great solutions, deserving of reward, I would urge our existing top contributors open up a donation facility at least, both generally and for each of their previously published solutions and to consider the same approach I am considering for future contributions.
  • I have increasingly started to build solutions that are powerful but minimalistic in nature, dividing the parts into stand alone solutions. As a result these solution’s may be small, but they are part of a greater ecosystem with massive potential. Do we publish component’s, whole solutions or editions or all of these?

Why have I not published much so far?

  • In many cases my solutions meet my needs and requirements and need additional effort to generalise, document and pluginify, not to mention feedback and review, in addition to being added to a library. I take the need to document and structure publish solutions professionally and this takes time and effort. Just look at the Quality of Mohammad’s, Eric and Marios (to name a few) output.
  • Many of my solutions demonstrate a Proof of Concept and need further work to publish.
  • Some of my solutions are revolutionary in nature and need more work to execute.

In closing

I would appreciate your feedback on any aspect of this post and would be keen to hear from anyone who knows how to make use of an existing funding platform that may be a good fit. I already do fund the existing https://opencollective.com/ platform a little, but can not yet visualise, if I can do what I want within it.

Finally, I am big on collaboration so if anyone is interested in a joint venture, let’s talk.

1 Like
#2

Here is an example of one solution I have developed but needs that extra effort to publish that may be of general use.

Linker

  • An alternative to the existing listitem template that is use used in most lists
    • Can be used as a template, transclusion or macro.
    • Can be used to quickly list items according to a filter
      • With an optional header
      • Copy list to clipboard
      • Copy list filter to clipboard
      • Link to customise linker
  • Linker extends each list item with a link that includes;
    • use the caption if available
    • Display icon if available
    • Tooltips tooltip and/or description field
    • Click to Open below (no Navigation)
    • Click to Edit tiddler
    • Click to copy title
    • Preview tiddler content
    • Link history
1 Like
#3

I feel your pain. The conundrum is partly that I don’t think one can expect this group of users to support you enough. That is nothing to do with lack of concern; more-like lack of the sheer numbers you need has enough rich people.

I am not sure that a blind outreach via Patreon et al would work largely because TW’s brilliance is not immediately manifest. Overall, TW is not as good as it needs be on marketing itself (just my opinion!).

I consider it a puzzle.

Note: @jeremyruston has made money through (I believe) having clients whom he delivers bespoke solutions to.

I dunno what the solution is for your situation.
I hope others, particularly engaged developers, may have a more positive take?

Very best wishes
TT

4 Likes
#4

Thanks for you view @TiddlyTweeter. If the truth be known I suppose I made money in the past for tiddlywiki. I sold contract hours on which a lot of work was done to build a automatic document generator from data stored in a tiddlywiki and hosted on SharePoint.

I suppose put this question here related to tiddlywiki business from the community, and I hear what you are saying.

However I do have a large suite of possible commercial solutions I can build using my tools and tiddlywiki, but as you highlighted these need to be marketed separately.

#5

Just a footnote. (Caveat: I am a social historian, not an entrepreneur.) Looking at the history of the net—Marketing has played as big a role as great coding, if not bigger.

I think TW is difficult to market because it is “all & everything”. I once did try to promote it as an “Operating System for web pages” but it went nowhere.

That said a focus on particular / specific “end-use cases” might be a clue? Dunno.

A stab in the dark
TT

#6

One of many more “commercial solution” ideas includes ;

A Rolling agenda and meeting items and minutes for committees, teams and project teams to use and publish meetings, take notes, assign tasks and produce minutes. This then role’s over to the next meeting. Perhaps like other smart documents.

1 Like
#7

Since you define who/what you want comments about, I’ll cut my thoughts short and summarize them into:

I think the money to be made is outside of the TW community, i.e in the real world. But there is a “middle step” between the community and the real world where I can imagine that some money could be made if you have the right business model, and that is to simplify for people to commercialize their own TW creations. I.e enable so others make money and you get paid from helping them to do so (perhaps by getting a cut of the money they make). I am thinking of tools like:

  • some solution to package TW as an app for Apples/Androids app stores
  • some API to simplify connecting TW to other systems
  • some “multi user” solution (or maybe Bob covers this fully?) so people can present their TW solutions as a system for they employer
5 Likes
#9

Have you considered simply straight up asking users for donations to support the org? I think most users aren’t even aware of these kinds of funding issues and need a little nudge to start supporting the project.

1 Like
#10

I think that is true!
TT

#11

Releasing plugins involves self smoking testing, docs writing, and improvements to help new users get the usage, so I really understand the situation you have and why you need support to continue the publishing.

I personally rarely expect a financial reward from building my tw plugins, I only regard it as a game I played after my daily work. The only way I think tw may help me earn money is that tw helps me think and write notes about making money…

As we all know, we have an increasing disparity between rich and poor in every country. So for things that can earn money, it must let rich men can pay a lot, and poor men can play freely. Blockchain and NFT is one of this kind of things.

I have some plan about NFT and gamefi in my mind, but I am busy building Demo of a new WYSIWYG editor: slate-write (unstable alpha stage) and other plugins these days. After they are finished, I will have more time explore blockchain related things and the possible connection to the tw. If you are interested, we can discuss it here.

I’m lucky to have a job that is not that busy and is stable enough, but I’m pessimistic about the outlook of the global economy in the next decade, so I will still keep thinking about these.

1 Like
#12

I have also been planning a crowd-funded model App based on TW. Loss of employment really hurt that (but the overworking before that probably hurt my progress just as much). I hope to get a remote job soon that will allow me to leverage TW in my day-to-day (wouldn’t that be neat).

I would be willing to collaberate on an opencollective.com funding plan once the job-search shakes out. I need to get used to that model/platform (I think its a better model than Kickstarter/Patreon, but also one that could possibly be used in parallel to Kickstarter?).

I think one of the most exciting possibilities, and one of the most often requested features is a multi-user model for tiddywiki. This invariably brings up the feature of multiple wikis hosted by said service (much better for authorization reader/writer concerns than trying to filter a single wiki-store per-user). This is a complex stack of technology, much less hosting that online somewhere securely. Setting up a nginx reverse proxy on a VM, setting up DNS, deciding on an authentication scheme (raw text user:passwords in requests is NOT a good idea on a public facing site). Complex stuff. There’s even other docker/etc based setups, each with their own complexity.

I think there’s an exciting opportunity with the Fission.codes hosted Tidldywiki App model. Fission allows “device+encryption-key based authentication” (user ID), which really simplifies the Authenticate->Authorize flow of things, and moves a lot of complexity from “the server” to “the edge”(the user’s device or very close to it).

A service that manages spawning new wikis and live-multiplayer syncing between users/devices would attract a huge number of new people. Offering it as an open-source thing that regular users can use and “just expect it to work” (data-backed up at regular intervals, etc), and that power-users can run themselves (worrying about their own backups) seems the way to go.

I’m tentatively calling my TW5+Yjs live-multiplayer thing “GuildWiki”. I would be cool to collaborate, especially if we can re-use lessions learned from, eg, GitHub - Arlen22/TiddlyServer: v2 - A static file server that can also save files and mount TiddlyWiki folders for multi-wiki support, Mentat & the new Multi-Column work for new layout ideas, etc, etc.

Thanks @TW_Tones for staring this thread.

2 Likes
#13

I too consider this one of the most critical barriers with tiddlywiki although there is continuous movement on this subject. I have at least tried to inspire collaboration on the development of a serial editing or check in/out so at least teams could work together on single file wikis. This is an example of where I find myself mostly on my own, trying to push the barriers, just to expand the capacity to publish solutions. But how many hours do I apply to this when I need work?.

I am keeping watch on your “TW5+Yjs live-multiplayer thing”, thanks for contributing.

3 Likes