TL;DR: Jeremy urgently needs new clients for commercial TiddlyWiki projects
It is my passionate belief that TiddlyWiki is more useful to everybody if it is free to use, with no financial barriers to long term adoption.
The conundrum is that TiddlyWiki is a relatively big, complex machine that requires a non-trivial amount of work to maintain and improve.
Our community is the magical ingredient that has made it possible to resolve that conundrum. Ethusiastic volunteers from the community spread the load by providing support to help others, making extensions and plugins, improving the code and documentation.
Speaking personally, the enthusiasm of the community is what gives me the confidence and motivation to want to work on TiddlyWiki. It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done, and I’m incredibly lucky just to know that my work is benefiting others.
There is an old saying to the effect that everyone has two deaths: when we draws our last breath and the last time someone says our name. From a slightly more cheerful perspective, what keeps TiddlyWiki alive is the community of people using it.
But the harsh reality is that none of that is sufficient to keep me alive and healthy if I am to be able to work full time on TiddlyWiki. I need to earn money.
Many people in my position seek donations from their communities but that has never seemed an attractive option to me.
Firstly, I think the money would be flowing the wrong way, in the sense that I’ve always felt that I benefit far more from people using TiddlyWiki than they do. The collective feedback of all those TiddlyWiki users drives everything I do; getting that kind of actionable feedback in a commercial setting would be immensely expensive and time consuming.
Secondly, my experience from speaking with other open source developers is that it is almost impossible to get individual donations to the level that would match the salary of the sort of job I would be doing if I wasn’t working on TiddlyWiki.
So, since I left BT in 2011 to start work on TiddlyWiki 5, I have focused on doing commercial consultancy work through my company Federatial (https://federatial.com).
For the first few years I would do anything I could, drawing on my experience to be an interim Chief Technology Officer for fledgling startups. Even in those roles, I would use as much as I could of the TiddlyWiki prototypes that I was working on (one of those startups is still using TW-based tools I made for them back in 2015/16).
For the last 5 or 6 years I’ve been able to focus on projects that are entirely TiddlyWiki-based. That has transformed things for me, enabling me to work on TiddlyWiki all the time. I work on multiple projects at once, frequently finding commonality between them. On a really good day, I’m able to make core improvements that benefit multiple projects that I’m working on, as well as being worthwhile for the broader community.
I’m immensely grateful to all of my clients for their support over the years, and I’m particularly lucky that my contracts have tended to be long term working relationships that enable us to achieve meaningful things.
But, at the end of this year one of my most important projects is drawing to a close, and so it is suddenly urgent that I find new consultancy work to make up the shortfall. This post is therefore partly an advertisement – if you control a commercial budget please do get in touch!
I also want to broaden things – I’m not the only one who needs to earn money, or who would like to work on TiddlyWiki. I’d like to make TiddlyWiki be a welcoming platform for any company or individual who wants to try to earn money because of it.
I think there are opportunities for everybody who wants to explore earning money around TiddlyWiki:
- Hosting services like TiddlyHost
- Online training courses
- Individual training sessions over Zoom
- “Fix my wiki” debugging services
- The sort of custom development that I do
So I propose a couple of concrete steps for the moment:
- Establish a new “Marketplace” category here at talk.tiddlywiki.org for individuals and businesses to post commercial offerings for products and services related to TiddlyWiki. I suspect we’ll need to have tight moderation rules to keep it useful, but I hope it would encourage people to offer their services, and help to kickstart a thriving marketplace
- Add a new front page panel to “HelloThere” on tiddlywiki.com labelled “Marketplace” that leads to a tiddler based on this post, along with links to the marketplace category
- I’d also like to try something I’ve never done before that might be controversial: adding an advertisement for Federatial to “HelloThere”. I’d welcome people’s views on this
I will also post a more detailed advertisement for Federatial once I’ve set up the new category, with some case studies etc.
This is a bit of a new area for us, so I’m eager to hear what other people think. Please feel free to ask questions or comment, including emailing me privately if you prefer.
Best wishes
Jeremy.