SouthBay TWIG get together?

[Eric Shulman]

Way back in 2006 during one of Jeremy's visits to the San Francisco
Bay Area, he and I got together with about a dozen others "TWiddlers",
and we met at a restaurant in San Francisco, but that was really just
a lunch-time thing, and we never did it again...

I think it would be really interesting (and fun!) to form local and/or
regional TiddlyWiki Interest Groups (TWIGs), where TiddlyWiki users/
authors/developers could gather together on a regular basis (monthly?
weekly?) for real-world face-to-face meetings to share ideas, show off
their latest creations, and provide hands-on help for newbies that are
just getting started with TiddlyWiki (similar to the way some Linux
User Groups (LUGs) hold "InstallFests" to assist newbies with setting
up their Linux systems).

IF we have enough people and can get organized, there are several
local "tech" companies that have been known to sponsor use of their
facilities for outside groups to hold regular sessions. Once I have a
sense of how many people might be involved, I can start approaching
these companies to see who might be willing to host a TWIG on a
regular basis.

Because I am located in the Sunnyvale, CA (in the heart of Silicon
Valley, about 8 miles from San Jose, and about 55 miles from San
Francisco), I'd like to hold a gathering somewhere nearby in the
"South Bay" area (Menlo Park, Stanford, Palo Alto, Mountain View,
Sunnyvale, etc.).

I'd like to "start the ball rolling" simply by finding out who might
be interested in having such a get-together, and if there is enough
early interest, perhaps we can meet informally at a local public
library, coffee house, or restaurant to discuss further plans...

Thoughts?

-e
Eric Shulman
TiddlyTools / ELS Design Studios

[Jeremy Ruston]

> Way back in 2006 during one of Jeremy's visits to the San Francisco
> Bay Area, he and I got together with about a dozen others "TWiddlers",
> and we met at a restaurant in San Francisco, but that was really just
> a lunch-time thing, and we never did it again...

It was my first trip to San Francisco as a TiddlyWikimist, and the
first time I met Eric. We took some pictures:

http://flickr.com/photos/jermy/92382558/

You can tell how delighted I was at the awesomeness of crossing the
planet to meet people who could talk me through my own code :)

Cheers

Jeremy

--
Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jer...@osmosoft.com
http://www.tiddlywiki.com

[Ash Sangoram]

I am certainly interested in such a meeting. I am at Stanford so am
relatively close by. I may actually be able to get a conference room
in the Clark Center for use (if the number of people is less than 15
or so), but will have to look into this before I promise for sure. At
worst there is a Peet's Coffee on the 3rd floor of the Clark center
that we could hijack tables from for such an initial meeting.

I've been using TiddlyWiki for about 10 months or so as an
electronic laboratory notebook to keep my data organized and I learn
constantly about how to use TiddlyWiki features to make this even more
robust for my purposes. I am really grateful for all of you out there
who spend their time without much recognition to develop and improve
the architecture.
To this end, I've been brewing an idea to publish an open access
article (my target was maybe something like PLOS Biology [Public
Library of Science] or a similar open access journal ensuring
accessibility to all scientists, with or without a subscription)
describing my attempts at developing a TiddlyWiki-based electronic
notebook for individual scientists (I would probably initially target
the life sciences), since the only real development in this realm is
at the biotech corporation level and not for the little guy in the
academic lab. I believe there is no financial incentive out there for
commercial electronic labnotebook companies to develop for the
individual scientist (and their solutions seem clunky anyway), so I
think an open-source driven project would be just the answer.

The paper would also cast light on and give credit to your wonderful
efforts to develop the TiddlyWiki itself. In connection with such a
paper, I would like to offer people use of my template electronic
notebook as a potential starting point (though a better one might be
developed from scratch and of course the beauty of TW is that everyone
can customize it to their specific lab requirements), and even suggest
that they host at Tiddlyspot. My goal is to create a scientific
version of what you guys have here: An collegial open-source
community that collectively improves the electronic lab notebook and
continues to offer it free of charge to the scientific community at
large for their use in day-to-day science.
I was hoping to recruit the help/advice of some of the key
developers of the architecture (like Jeremy, Eric and Simon Baird as I
use the MPTW as the basis of my TW (I call ELNTWiki) and maybe Saq as
I've used plugins from him and maybe a few key others who should be
involved ) to potentially act as co-authors if you are interested. I
am getting together a draft of this paper (hopefully to be ready in
advance of the South Bay meeting) and would love to meet at least some
of folks (like Eric) face to face to discuss the paper and how to
proceed to make it and the ELNTWiki even better (like getting a better
name for it ;-)) I figured that the South Bay meeting might be
perfect for meeting some of you (and if I could spend 10 minutes
telling you about my ideas that would be superb).
see: http://elabnotebook.tiddlyspot.com/ for a slightly older version
of my personal notebook ( I have made a few improvements to it but
haven't moved my private notebook's skeleton out to the public one
just yet but it will give you the idea of the organization of my
notebook).
Look forward to continued discussion regarding this idea and meeting
some of you face to face!

Ash Sangoram MD PhD
Neonatal Fellow
Lucile Packard Children's Hospital
318 Campus Drive
Clark Center W200
Stanford, CA 94305
sang...@gmail.com

> mailto:jeremy@osmosoft.comhttp://www.tiddlywiki.com

[Rafiki Cai]

Eric:

The TWIGs are a great idea.  Isn't Jeremy actually
scheduled to be in Cali next month?

Even though I don't live in the SV area, I am scheduled
to be there for a week next month (Voice Over Net Conference
in San Jose); and could see myself perhaps in the area
every other month or so.

------

Any Twiddlers in the Las Vegas area?

RC