TiddlyWiki development team and communication

#1

I’m not sure if TiddlyWiki has a dedicated development team, because I saw in the official plugin library that the plugins have descriptions saying they are maintained by the official team. If there is such a development team, that would be great.

However, from another post, I saw that the communication between developers does not seem very close. On the contrary, due to lack of timely communication, some misunderstandings or conflicts have arisen.

Although I don’t have much experience with team communication and collaboration, I have an idea - using TiddlyWiki itself to facilitate team communication.

Create a tiddlywiki with content written by the tiddlywiki development team. Development members write their ideas on it instead of bugs, and bugs can be raised in a github repository. Then other development members discuss these ideas further and can make appropriate suggestions. Then commits are saved using github. Of course there may be time differences, but these may be acceptable or changeable.

This way the development team or outstanding plugin authors can timely pay attention to this information and provide timely feedback. The entire TiddlyWiki is public but regular users cannot edit the content or write new content. However, regular users can refer to the discussions and provide feedback in the forums.

Of course the above is just one proposed way, there must be other ways in practice, like social media. But I sincerely hope the TiddlyWiki development team can maintain stable communication, come up with ideas to implement together, and jointly promote the development of TiddlyWiki.

I think after the communication, two things can be made clear - whether the new development should be included in the TiddlyWiki core and carried forward, or developed as plugins for users to decide whether to install.

In any case, I hope to see TiddlyWiki develop better and better.

#2

I’m not the best person to answer this, but I thought such a question should not be left unanswered.
I do only occasional small commits, mainly to the docs, rarely to the core, so I might not get the whole picture right.

I guess as in case of all small open source projects, the team is not a very formal construct. In the sentence regarding official plugins you quote, I believe it means simply that the development of these plugins is done on the same rules as the core.

You have some interesting ideas on how to improve dev communication. I am afraid there might be simply not enough of very active core devs right now that would warrant the time investment of creating such a custom tool.

@jeremyruston is, I believe, full-time on, but for others it is probably more or less a hobby or after-hours activity, even if they do a lot of work on it. If we look at GH statistics, then @pmario and @saqimtiaz are the next two most engaged core devs in the recent two years, and from what I see, they seem to commit quite a lot of time to work on TW. And of course there are many others who commit or have contributed to the core or GH discussions. And those who develop non-official, but for many users essential, plugins which is just as important.

One idea that should make things more fluent was to change GH repo management, so that various permissions like merging would be more spread across more people. Right now all merges are done by Jeremy, which gives him a lot of work and can slow things down. But I cannot tell what are the obstacles on moving to this new organisation model (legal? GH-dependent?).

I hope this answers your concerns just a little bit.

#3

TiddlyWiki does not have a dedicated development team, in the sense of a group of people paid to work on it full time.

Our core development “team” is a loose collective of the regular committers on GitHub, but I still think of us as a team.

My own work on TiddlyWiki is supported by my consultancy work. Nowadays all the projects that I work on involve TiddlyWiki, and so I do work with TiddlyWiki full-time, but I don’t work on TiddlyWiki full-time.

There’s some important context to that discussion. @Flibbles is in an unusual position of needing to maintain plugins that depend on the TiddlyWiki core without being a participant in the community. That’s a tough nut to solve because our development model is participatory: one finds out what is going on by following the action and getting involved.

That’s not to say that there aren’t improvements that we could make. In general, I prefer to explore ideas that have already proven successful in other open source communities. I don’t think it is our job to invent new ways to manage open source projects.

As you know, there is already a documentation wiki written by and for developens at https://tiddlywiki.com/dev, but you are suggesting going further and transplanting new feature discussions to a hosted TiddlyWiki. Those discussions currently happen on GitHub and here on Talk. I do not think we are yet at the point where TiddlyWiki can offer a comparable user experience.

It’s also worth noting that the development discussions happen on GitHub largely because there are special features there that make it simple to refer to code and issues.

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#4

@vilc @jeremyruston Thank you both very much for your replies.

The first point I want to make is that I don’t have much experience with open source projects and I don’t really know how to communicate code related things on github.

But I think if there are still a lot of people contributing to the project, I think these major contributors could schedule regular times to discuss things together. For example, a month before a new release is going to be made, find a common time to discuss what issues are going to be addressed in this release and what issues are going to be addressed in the next release. Or more issues like that.

This way everyone understands their respective needs at once, as there are some contributors who are also responsible for key or even extremely important plugins for tiddlywiki, like the relink plugin. A video or audio chat would be a bit more direct than text communication. Of course this may require that the participants need to have an adequate level of English.

Of course it might also require a moderator to run the whole thing, but I think the contributors should be able to discuss it pretty well. I noticed that there were some tiddlywiki hangouts before, but they don’t seem to be happening anymore.

Anyway, I’m very grateful to the contributors for what they do, without them, tiddlywiki wouldn’t be as strong as it is today.

#5

The above is just a rough idea, not that it’s necessarily going to be implemented. What I mean is that I would like to see a little better and more communication between teams. That would reduce some unnecessary conflicts.