To pick up Eric's points first, I should restate a few of the goals/plans for TW5:
- To make it much, much easier to use, by taking much more trouble over the journey users need to take as they download and start to use it - To make it simpler to find and update plugins by having a central plugin library - To run TW5 as a cooperative commercial business, with the core contributors sharing income The other thing I'm trying to do is make a better fist of documentation as I go along. My feeling is that TW suffers primarily from a lack of easy to find, authoritative reference information. In terms of revenue streams for TW5, I think there's a few worth investigating: - Selling TiddlyWiki commemorative mugs and T-shirts, with special limited editions, mugs signed by Eric and so on - Affiliate fees. The hope is that users will be able to take a very simple journey from tiddlywiki.com to signing up with a hosting provider like Joyent or Amazon to have their TW5 running in the cloud. >From an end user perspective, the goal is for the process to be as simple as signing up for Facebook, albeit with a payment stage. So, the end user gets a solid service that they paid for, Amazon/Joyent get a new customer, and TW5 gets a kickback. - Sponsorship. If we can make TW5 100 times more popular than the current product, then I'm hoping all kinds of good things would happen, including the possibility of getting a couple of commercial sponsors to support the cooperative in exchange for tasteful badges on tiddlywiki.com itself. - The idea of publishing a book, which I think would be marvellous - Finally, consultancy work around TiddlyWiki. For instance, back in 2006 I did a contract for SocialText to help them integrate TiddlyWiki as SocialText Unplugged (and met Chris Dent in the process, of course). If we build a rich and useful ecosystem then organisations will pay us to get access to it. Anyhow, it all starts with building an utterly awesome product, and then spreading the word. We need to embed the idea that if you love TiddlyWiki, the obligation is to talk about; more even than donating and buying T-shirts. If everyone who loved it got their bosses/wives/children/friends to use it, we might see a kind of conscious viral spread. TiddlyWiki is an unusual open source project in that it's audience is end users rather than software developers. Node.js is a wonderful thing, but it's only useful to software developers. Our potential audience is surely much, much bigger than Node's. Best wishes Jeremy On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 6:51 AM, Alex Hough <r.a.ho...@gmail.com> wrote: >> IMO the project does sorely need a "docs curator" who is at least an >> experienced user, ideally with explicit support from the dev-gurus > > Hans > > There has been some discussion about this topic. Eric is writing a > book and I have made a start on one. There are several others are > interested too. > I think that the general feeling is that some kind of funding model is > required. > > I was looking at the one of the files on Github and reading Jeremy's > TW5 documentation. I think that, while being hard to understand, some > pointers towards these might help. > > Exploring the idea of "docs curator" is a good idea IMHO. Perhaps we > could take time out from Tiddling our TW and get our heads > together..... > > - my latest thought is this; Do some research which incorporates the > history of TW, get funding from a research body. TW might make an > interesting study for an academic interested in open innovation > > > Alex > > > > > On 24 February 2012 05:08, HansBKK <hans...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thursday, February 23, 2012 11:50:15 PM UTC+7, Eric Weir wrote: >>> >>> That makes me think that few people are learning about TW or that those >>> that do abandon it pretty quickly because the skill prerequisites for using >>> it are so high. Given its power and versatility that is unfortunate. >>> >>> I hung around here a year and a half before I began to get an idea how I >>> might use TW, and then I was fortunate to have a skilled developer >>> practically do a custom TW for me. Otherwise, I would have moved on, too. >>> >> I'd say it took me about 4-6 months, but I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and >> probably devoted 500 hours to "playing around" over that time. This of >> course includes getting to know many plugins and also a bit about theming, >> which was also combined with getting up to speed on improving my CSS at the >> time. >> >> I see the "canned templates" like the GTD flavors, especially Monkey for >> taggly tagging, TWtree, etc as the user-ready apps, but it's true that any >> serious customization requires a decent commitment to learning to use TW as >> a toolkit. >> >> IMO the project does sorely need a "docs curator" who is at least an >> experienced user, ideally with explicit support from the dev-gurus, to to >> consolidate and add to all the relevant docs on core TW + the important >> plugins in one place, or perhaps two if there is a distinction between >> "official" docs and "community" wiki. >> >> Each of the server-side solutions also needs their own. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "TiddlyWiki" group. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/-/f-AOJsUGNXIJ. >> >> 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. > > -- > 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. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. 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