Alex, Paul, and others, I appreciate your comments with respect to both governance issues and the potential downside of introducing any kind of "performance metrics" into a community of peers. I am hoping that you and the broader community can help us come up find approaches to these issues that work well for the TiddlyWiki community.
First some tiny background: * Jeremy started TiddlyWiki on his own and remains an independent minded technical leader of TW development even in his position at BT Osmosoft * Around the same time the Jeremy started TiddlyWiki I started the UnaMesa Association and was fortunate enough to find Jeremy. Thanks to grants from Ricoh Innovations, UnaMesa helped make it possible for Jeremy, Eric, and other associates to spend more time helping the community and less time worrying about paying the bills. * Since Jeremy joined BT, BT has provided grants to the UnaMesa Association to support the TW community. That raises two questions: ** How best to support the community? ** How to demonstrate that support to UnaMesa funders so that they know they are getting good value for their money. The main reason for initiating the feedback form was to help answer these questions. I recognize that the feedback form has many flaws. It would be much better if we could, for example, automatically analyze the conversations on the groups and try to somehow show what value was generated. Unfortunately we haven't found anything or anyone who could do that kind of analysis. I also want to be clear that this is not the beginning of some kind of "pay for help" model. I started UnaMesa because of frustration with the lack of good IT options for schools, clinics, social services, and almost any kind of small business. Most business models for software tend to work against the interests of customers by using some soft of "lock-in" or forced upgrade model. Open source helps, but even there the programmers and support personnel need to eat and they end up adopting models like "pay for premium" or "pay for service" that again goes against the interests of the customers. Information technology and knowledge in general provides the most value to "customers" when it is shared and everyone is able to contribute and build upon each others work. Nevertheless, programmers "need to eat" in order for the effort to be sustainable. So UnaMesa is an experiment in providing software and support services freely to communities while providing support to people who have something of value to the community and want to contribute but would be unable to do so without financial assistance. Of course, UnaMesa welcomes any contributions (which go directly back into supporting the community) but we have no intention of making money a requirement to get the best help possible. Like the Apache foundation and other non profits that support open source projects, part of our mission is to operate the trac, svn, and documentation sites at *.tiddlywiki.org. Unlike most other groups we actively support the community. This includes current users of TiddlyWiki as well as potential users such as classrooms (e.g. the StudentNotebook) and clinics who may not know about TW or related technologies. I wish we had great metrics to help us decide what's most important and show the value created for students, patients, and others in the community. We don't yet and the feedback form is just one, imperfect step to help us do it a bit better. We welcome your ideas and suggestions. Lastly, one point about transparency. UnaMesa is a virtual organization with associates spread around the globe. All of our coordination happens through our project wikis which are available to the public at http://www.projects.unamesa.org/. On that site you can find transcripts of our weekly conference calls and get more details than anyone cares to know about our connections with BT and other partners. -Greg --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to TiddlyWiki@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
