Should there be a TiddlyWiki Steering Committee?

[jeremyruston]

Thanks @poc2go these are good questions, and have prompted a useful discussion.

@poc2go

I would like to contribute to TiddlyWiki - and expand my knowledge - but do not know were to start? A high-level guide of what projects are of importance to the direction of TiddlyWiki, focused on where is TiddlyWiki expected to be three years from now? What are the plans forward? where it is to go?, are there any plans? where do I go to help?

As things stand, the centre of TW development is GitHub. As a potential dev, an important way to get involved is to follow the project and track new tickets and PRs.

For example, right now there is a PR in progress that makes substantial improvements to the way that transclusion, macros and globals work. At this early point, all the discussion and collaboration is taking place there on GitHub. Once things are more finalised the discussions are likely to move over here to talk.tiddlywiki.org.

So far, we’ve not had a roadmap, more a series of evolving conversations and experiments that drive development.

I do recognise that we’re lacking in this area. One thing I’ve done to try to make progress in this area is to establish https://tiddlywiki.org/ as a community hub, with publication there intended as the reification process for important community matters. A high level roadmap (ie in user terms, not dev terms) would be useful, and I have already made a start on a code of conduct.

One of the main reasons that we make slow progress on things like this is the lack of people who are willing to help who have previous experience with open source projects. Most of our users are not developers, and many of our developers learned to be developers in the context of TiddlyWiki, and so lack broader experience.

@poc2go

An ‘official’ organized steering committee could define, support, direct, and motivate the community to projects that are believed by higher level persons and developers to be important for TiddlyWiki’s growth.

I’d love to see this. It would reduce the personal dependency on me, which would be good.

@poc2go

A definitive guide as to where the core and editions are headed, to design and define sub-tasks that need to be done. A set of distinct tasks that need to be implemented for project completion. Maybe meetings to discuss fluid and unexpected changes in the project, resolve misunderstandings, discuss priorities, and blocking issues.

A lot of that stuff does of course happen on GitHub already, but it isn’t pulled together and published in a digestible form.

@poc2go

Only way I know to do this - is with a steering committee. Please advise.

I’d be very pleased to explore this if you’re willing and able to help get things off the ground? Much appreciated.

[poc2go]

Thank you all for responding!

Kinda TL;DR - sorry ;(

After looking at many open source projects, TiddlyWiki is one which seems to be in line with where I think the future of computing systems development is headed. Can be used in browser/app/server/cloud; private and commercial environments which not only focuses on keep-it-simple but also pushes the boundaries of modern day system development. Keeping things simple is complicated.

Currently, as far as I can tell, there are over 1000 seemingly disjointed issues and push requests (PR) on the TiddlyWiki GitHub site. This makes it almost impossible for current and future contributors to focus on substantial projects which they can contribute in their small part; be it management, coding, plugins, presentation, documentation.

I am proposing that a project management system is needed to organize the guidance and collaboration required to see TiddlyWiki advance into future software development environments. Granted, this may not be the desired ‘roadmap’ of TiddlyWiki future growth. TiddlyWiki is currently very successful growing organically by the efforts of individual needs and contributions to satisfy those needs.

However, the wishes and demands which the community is placing on a relatively small group of core developers to maintain and progress the growth of TiddlyWiki is… IMO - unfair. We as a community could do much more to assist under their guidance.

There is much management underpinning that would need to be done. A standardized, navigable project system in which contributors can discover distinct and timely tasks that match their skill set, approve project PRs and submissions, published commitment of leaders to support and guide a project to completion, to motivate and promote a project’s worth, focus on the tasks to be done, insure contribution procedures and guidelines are being followed.

These tasks have very little to do with ‘in the trenches’ programming, testing, inline and usage documentation. I should note that in the commercial world is relatively easy to find a coder - not so easy to find a person that can manage and be accountable for implementing a complex project from conception to completion. This management skill set is difficult to acquire and TiddlyWiki can help promote people that wish to advance their careers by learning how to manage projects.

There are project management systems out there. As a start should consider to use the project system provided on GitHub, seems natural as much of the TiddlyWiki dev cycle is already on GitHub. The GitHub project system is somewhat lacking, but Microsoft just released a new beta ‘project’ system on GitHub and since something is better than nothing, maybe can use it?

Also recommend for a review system to ‘separate the wheat from the chaff’ to focus TiddlyWiki development. The archiving of dated, stale, resolved, or ‘never-to-be-done’ issues and PR’s. A roadmap can be envisioned by cherry picking requests that are currently supported by leaders and community. Possibly a ‘trend’ can be discovered describing and focusing on branches of interests to assist where TiddlyWiki should grow.

Organizing a set of tasks into projects helps leadership to define and prioritize the multiple directions the software is to be taken, allows leaders to more easily move sub-tasks between projects, determine a dependency ‘chain’ where a project needs to be implemented before another project can be realized. Evaluate the current stage of development, to step in and resolve when project members disagree on a course of action, micro manage when required, guide when a project goes astray, be notified and provide solutions to blocking problems. Not to mention - assists in mitigating burn-out of project stakeholders.

Over the next few months (am currently engaged in a seemingly never-ending grrrr… project), will go through the existing 1000+ issues/PR’s and build a site which tries to roughly consolidate and organize similar issues and PRs into projects with high/medium/low profiles, to poll projects wished by the community, those wished by devs, avenues for project discussion and contributions - many of these avenues already exist and can be referenced in project documents to guide and promote contributor interaction. The foundation for discussion is already implemented using GitHub and this forum at talk.tiddlywiki.org.

Like to use this forum for polls and advice? Is a start, or am I deluding myself in thinking all this management stuff could be helpful? Or, will just stifle the organic growth of TiddlyWiki? - there are positives and negatives.

What do you think?

[TiddlyTweeter]

@poc2go

Like to use this forum for polls and advice? Is a start, or am I deluding myself in thinking all this management stuff could be helpful? Or, will just stifle the organic growth of TiddlyWiki? - there are positives and negatives.

What do you think?

Small footnote. I think your comments are interesting.

On negatives, I think an issue is simply numbers in TiddlyTalk.
I’m not so sure “polls” on dev aspects here on Discourse make the same sense they might on GitHub for TW?

On positives, I do see folk like @TW_Tones wanting outreaching more explicit to help us all by engaging “audiences” in “projects”. But I’m just not so sure you can do that here effectively (repeat: relevant user numbers too low?).

@jeremyruston made some excellent points (as he would know).

I don’t know an answer. These are just more comments that go nowhere unfortunately.

Best, TT

[jeremyruston]

Thank you @poc2go.

Apropos of both using GitHub’s project management system and clearing up the TW5 issues backlog, I’m planning to move it from being a personal repository into the main TiddlyWiki organisation. That will enable us to use finer grained permissions to eg allow contributors to label and close tickets. There’s a ticket here:

Consolidate GitHub Organizations for TiddlyWiki

[joshuafontany]

I am getting back into Software dev in a team environment as my day job, so this all is very pertinent. I would be interested in helping on this end, especially the testing/automation end, but also interested in curating those outstating issues, etc. I also think that moving the main repo from @jermolene’s personal space to a TiddlyWiki group space is the right way to start.

[Mario]

I completely missed that thread, because it was in Café … Which states: "Always off-topic …

I think this is an important topic which should be seen and discussed by the whole community, that’s why I did move it to the Discussion category. …

[cdaven]

There are questions in e.g. How to stimulate User Growth of TW? and "Nah... not for me" - Why? that at least to me seem to depend on a long-term strategy for TiddlyWiki.

Some examples:

1. I think we would gain more users if we switched to Markdown. Markdown is all the rage, and it’s super-popular right now. Let’s get rid of WikiText, it’s too hard anyway!
2. I think we would make a lot of money if we made TiddlyWiki a freemium cloud service, and maybe removed the other alternatives from the website.
3. I think TiddlyWiki is way too hard and geeky. Let’s simplify everything and make it just like Notion! The geeks can fork off to GeekyWiki.

In order to say whether these ideas are good or bad, we need to know where we do and don’t want to go with TiddlyWiki. (Who is this “we” anyway? You can always fork off another “we” with open source.)

[TiddlyTweeter]

@cdaven

There are questions in e.g. How to stimulate User Growth of TW? and “Nah… not for me” - Why? that at least to me seem to depend on a long-term strategy for TiddlyWiki.

First, I think that you care to probe the issues on TW uptake is fantastic! And you give useful bullet points. Even if I may have a slightly different take, it is all to the good!

@cdaven

I think we would gain more users if we switched to Markdown. Markdown is all the rage, and it’s super-popular right now. Let’s get rid of WikiText, it’s too hard anyway!

Markdown is more limited than WikiText so why limit to it? But I’m not so bothered by that issue.
In a context of use markup methods and syntaxes (may need) vary by use case? Just a comment.

@cdaven

I think we would make a lot of money if we made TiddlyWiki a freemium cloud service, and maybe removed the other alternatives from the website.

Erm? It is certainly an interesting concept! The issue is likely limitation? Could that work universally? Could it increase uptake?

@cdaven

I think TiddlyWiki is way too hard and geeky. Let’s simplify everything and make it just like Notion! The geeks can fork off to GeekyWiki.

This a very interesting one to me. I think you are right that hitting this Discourse, and also the main TW docs site, IS geeky. But is that a fault or a feature? I am no geek nor wish to be one. BUT I can see that TW develops because of the skill and interest of those “geek” people ! “Geekism” seems essential (that does not exclude “Norma & Normal” )

Maybe behind your thought??? is that in ADDITION we might add “showcases”—with there own docs, for limited purposes? In other words: present a TYPE of TW with precise instructions dedicated to one purpose?

@cdaven

(Who is this “we” anyway? You can always fork off another “we” with open source.)

Hopefully it includes at least you and me probing these issues

Thoughts, TT

[Mark_S]

@TiddlyTweeter

First, I think that you care to probe the issues on TW uptake is fantastic! And you give useful bullet points. Even if I may have a slightly different take, it is all to the good!

I understood cdaven to be itemising the opinions expressed by others, not his own take.

[boris]

@poc2go

Like to use this forum for polls and advice? Is a start, or am I deluding myself in thinking all this management stuff could be helpful? Or, will just stifle the organic growth of TiddlyWiki? - there are positives and negatives.

I think you can consider this to be the “higher level than Github” space for discussion.

Re: steering committee – right now, there is a lack of people volunteering and actually doing more things.

So if you want to help @jeremyruston with the TW Github org

Should there be a TiddlyWiki Steering Committee?

Thank you @poc2go. Apropos of both using GitHub’s project management system and clearing up the TW5 issues backlog, I’m planning to move it from being a personal repository into the main TiddlyWiki organisation. That will enable us to use finer grained permissions to eg allow contributors to label and close tickets. There’s a ticket here:

Or, I’m still looking for someone to volunteer to maintain the Discourse server backend for this forum.

The “steering committee” is here already – just needs more doing.

[cdaven]

@Mark_S

@TiddlyTweeter

First, I think that you care to probe the issues on TW uptake is fantastic! And you give useful bullet points. Even if I may have a slightly different take, it is all to the good!

I understood cdaven to be itemising the opinions expressed by others, not his own take.

My point is that some changes may very well increase TiddlyWiki’s popularity and number of new users – but cause a rebellion among existing users, who oppose the new dumbed-down roadmap, and maybe fork the software and community into a “TiddlyWiki 5 Classic”.

This is, in my mind, where the steering committee explains the (main) vision for TiddlyWiki, the sought-after userbase, raison d’être and so on. That makes it easier to make the hard calls.

[Ste_W]

Ok… So whose up for this?

[joshuafontany]

I’m down. Let us schedule a Discord meeting to talk about this. I’ll let people respond here, but I think a timeslot at the end of this week would work. I am (atm) free after 1pm Pacific on Fri 8/19. I might be on the road, but I can probably take a call. Anyone else?

[TW_Tones]

I would be happy to, if not hard on Australian Eastern standard time +10 UTC.

I have a paid Zoom account as well.

[TiddlyTweeter]

@joshuafontany

et us schedule a Discord meeting to talk about this. I’ll let people respond here, but I think a timeslot at the end of this week would work.

I’m up for it, but would it not be good to have an agenda?

What are the issues to discuss?

TT

[boris]

@joshuafontany et al – I’ve split this into its own thread Steering Committee Meeting

[Offray]

This seems like lets make TW more like Notion. But I think that that space is already occupied… well by Notion and its closer clones.

While I would like to have more compatibility with Markdown in the form of exporters/importers, I don’t think that Markdown can replace WikiText because of the extensibility of the last one. Also regarding paid plans, there are starting attempts, like the ones discussed on Paid plans for TiddlyHost.

I think that the steering committee should be more like a non-profit umbrella that maps/connects different alternatives to keep TW extensible and make it more sustainable in the future, which is not incompatible with some calls to make TW more “enterprise ready”, but that could be done by the professional associations and enterprises around TW. A model that comes to mind regarding bridging community, professional, academic, enterprise initiatives around a technology, without the particular agenda of one of them above the others, is the one of Pharo. Of course, others are available also, but this is one I’m familiar with.