[RFC] Sponsored development of tiddlywiki tools and solutions?

[TW Tones]

Folks,

A lot of contributors here are deserving of reward for their efforts. As a result I do make one off or continuing patreon donations to a few in our community.

The discussion of money can be difficult but I would like to hear your considered thoughts.

In my own circumstances I am currently unemployed, If I take a full time job, I will have far less time for TiddlyWiki, although I hope to use it in my job.

As you may be aware I already try and contribute a lot to the community and as a result of developing  super user or designer skills I have designed many tools and features for tiddlywiki. Basically I have a library of many dozens of tools, however I have not being able to justify the time to polish and publish them. Many of my tools are designed to fill gaps that arise, as I develop larger tiddlywiki solutions, mostly for my self.

What I would like your feedback on both as users and developers is the possibility of some of us (especially myself) being able to attract some sponsorship to get the job done. Here are my thoughts;

• Provide a patreon or similar channel for regular donations to sponsor my time producing such open source solutions.
• Provide a requests channel, so people can submit a request for a solution.
• Provide a list of tools you can choose to sponsor for earlier release through donations which also act as an upvote.
• Finally offer a private method to commission work.

Given my belief in Open source I  would continue to contribute much for free, especially contributions to the forums. Any work funded by sponsorship or donations would be made freely available to the community. Only specific and private commissions may not, although components may be.

Some possible issues

One issue for me is even if people value such a service to request or bring forward particular solutions, ultimately I will still need to depend on the generosity of others when I need help in the forums. I do still have a few areas of weakness. Whilst I can see circumstances when donations may permit me to commission others I don't expect this would be so common, unless my earnings are sufficient to cover this. Perhaps I can grant contributors credit in my own "shop" for thanks.

Equity for people such as Jeremy and other developers needs to be addressed. Can we find a way to encourage more contributions to those such as Jeremy, Mario and Eric without the community becoming an "only if funded model". Of course if people are in a position to give their time freely we want to encourage this to continue.

If I am going to do this I need to start in a hurry, so I do not want to add anything unnecessary to the "critical path" but perhaps we could have a shared "shop".

Yours with trepidation and sincerity.

Tones

[TW Tones]

For example,

Find attached a "SVG image" tiddler, import it

Transclude it in your viewTemplate or tiddler and if the current tiddler has a color value it will display a "swatch" of that color. The value in the color field will be displayed on mouse over.

To polish and publish this it would also have;

• A button that works in the toolbars, and selective click to  pick color
• A button on which if you drop a color name or number it will update the color field of the current tiddler
• A Set of draggable named color swatches in a side bar tab

Extended tools would allow the search and selection from thousands of named colors.

• Would you consider a donation to make this happen?
• What accountability for donations would you expect?

Regards

Tones

[TW Tones]

Sorry transclude as such  {{||$:/PSaT/images/color-swatch}} to apply to current tiddler.

[R²]

Hi Tones,

Thanks for raising this major question. As most non-developers, despite being an active user, I am mostly a passive bystander as far as the community is concerned. I am of course highly aware of how much I rely on developers such as yourself for my favourite tools and feel strongly about finding ways to contribute towards making sure TiddlyWiki can continue to thrive.

I've been thinking about this on and off since Soren released his incredible Grok Tiddlywiki in particular, as Soren has recently released two projects that really resonate with me and has considerably empowered me in my tinkering. I finalized a one-off donation this morning after ticking off another chapter of Grok TW, but the issue is of course that supporting only one developer/documenter, especially as a one-off, feels like an easy cop out, and ideally this would have to be balanced out by something that makes sure that the key developers are also properly taken into account and contributes to some sort of long-term stability and predictability for developers.

Now, who are the key developers? Users like me cannot possibly be expected to be discerning in that matter when deciding how and where to direct their donation. Your top of mind seems to be Jeremy, Mario and Eric, as well as yourself to some extent I imagine. Let me tell me about mine. I'd mention Jeremy, Dave Gifford and Mohammed, but simply because those are names that stuck to my mind while lurking around the forum for my own intents and purposes. I would have recognized your icon, though I'd probably have associated it to Dave. There's also a guy with a icon of a wolf that I find pretty neat and some interesting mannerisms, and another one with a flat comics face that seems to be a real regular but I couldn't remember his name without checking. I never really went on the Github page except to star the project. In reality, I have no precise idea who's contributing most and I have a feeling many potential donors wouldn't either. What I have is an uninformed, biased vision of someone who couldn't possibly intelligently support an individual developer other than based on external wow factor alone or random mental shortcuts. 

There are probably many more developers out there, with very different personal situations. Some would benefit greatly from more money at a personal level, while others have high paying jobs and would view this as beer or coffee money. Some, including yourself would actually be able to commit more time to Tiddlywiki or avoid dropping out by having more funds go their way, and these are not necessarily the same as the former group, and perhaps even developers that are completely out of the picture at present. Beyond this counterfactual, there's also the question of the "bang for the buck": a dollar in Iran has more purchasing power that in the US... So many questions that personally have led me to a situation of analysis paralysis regarding Tiddlywiki and yet, here I am, also a long-term monthly donator to Linux Mint. Mint provided me with an easy "set and forget" mechanism to support the community, presenting me with a nice, trustworthy black box to address my money to. It's easy to view this support through the SaaS lens too. I currently pay $5 a month, an amount I decided based both on my modest means and on what Microsoft probably managed to squeeze out of me on average when I was a Windows user. I also pay for my Internet access (a share of €18/2=€9 per month), my phone bill (€5*2=€10 for my two lines), an Internet server and domain names, and pay around €120 per year for other software (mostly as donations these days). Supporting my PIM shouldn't be any different, and I indeed used to pay for Evernote a few years ago for a much inferior product with no authentic sense of purpose. My absolute ideal solution as a user would be to have the same kind of support mechanism for TiddlyWiki, no accountability needed, just knowing the core developers have found some sort of agreement and viable form of governance would be enough as far as I'm concerned and I'd pay $10/month in my current situation, plus $50–100 per year on an ad hoc basis.

On top of that, I'd love to have clear opportunities for one-off donations, either ex-post or for earlier releases. A nice feature would be to have make this expense-friendly because many of us can file reasonable outside expenses for such things, either as independents or employees. Your prize pool idea is interesting, but I guess we wouldn't want, say, three developers to waste their time carrying out the same kind of work in triple to claim a given prize given how few you are. From a individual standpoint, I think the most promising proposal would therefore be "a list of tools you can choose to sponsor for earlier release through donations which also act as an upvote" as I find the core extremely polished for my own needs and I'd of course love to cast a vote in favour of new and shiny things that I could get to use. Your last idea, offering a private method to commission work is also of course something to consider of course. It seems there's no "Tiddlywiki developer for hire" page on tiddlywiki.com, which seems like a missed opportunity.

Hope this helps.

Best,

R²

[TW Tones]

R² et al

Thanks for your considered response and openness. I think I feel very similar to you and would still be keen to support others even if I were a recipient myself. 

As soon as I posted I realised, I could easily have named another dozen or more contributors, but of course this list would always grow. And perhaps as a longer term member I know far more names as a result. Some people are more productive and proliferate as well, and really we have little or no idea as to each persons circumstances. If I were not wanting and had more time to give, I would unlikely ask for support.

Also another thing that differs greatly is what people have to offer. Some have deep tiddlywiki core knowledge, others Javascript and CSS, some with aesthetic design skills. Some are good at explaining, documenting, publishing easy solutions and others at framing the questions that everyone wants to ask, but could not. Some of our newcomers are so valuable to us by teaching us what people find difficult, nd others because they bring knowledge of alternatives, competitors or useful approaches and algorithm's.

So I suppose so as to present where I am coming from perhaps I should write about my own tiddlywiki and broader skills as they relate to tiddlywiki.

Tones

[Mohammad Rahmani]

Hi R2 and Tones

I saw my name in the post. So I wanted to reply!

1. While there are many other developers/contributors who deserve to be named here, I absolutely name Saq Imtiaz. His talent and great contributions to Tiddlywiki core and community tools is not deniable.

2. I have never considered myself as a Tiddlywiki developer/contributor, as I had no or little contribution (I do not know any JS), but I tried to solve my own problems by asking many questions here in the group or GitHub and if I solved the problem I shared it with enough documentation lets others use it be able further develop it (my career is like this! at university we publish free of charge what we find!)! I asked to star some projects because I wanted to know if there is any interest to maintain it (Shiraz has the highest stars = 38 which you can consider as nill!)

3. I definitely support the idea to donate to Tiddlywiki itself and developers/contributors! and like Google Summer Code, I propose Tiddlywiki Summer Code to fund some ideas/projects (the fund can be provided as community donation, ...)

Best wishes

Mohammad

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[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Tones, R²,

Thanks for the thoughtful posts.

On 20 May 2021, at 08:06, R² <renaud...@gmail.com> wrote:

It seems there's no "Tiddlywiki developer for hire" page on tiddlywiki.com, which seems like a missed opportunity.

I have been thinking about that recently, and have a tentative plan to build a new https://market.tiddlywiki.com/ site that would consist of classified listings of services offered and services wanted. I’d be inclined to focus on the “sell” side first, making a storefront for people/organisations to offer their services.

Just like links.tiddlywiki.com, the idea is that each seller would register the URL of a TiddlyWiki that contains the details of their offering. The system would scrape the individual sites at regular intervals and aggregate together the information into a single site.

Site visitors would see a page listing all of the sellers, and be able to click through to see a page with the full details of a seller. We could reuse the tagging and search from links.tiddlywiki.com.

Some of the information that would be useful to bring together:

* Name

* Logo

* Site URL

* Services offered (again, we’d need to evolve a set of standard tags for this)

* Timezone

* Languages spoken/written

* Areas of specialisation

* Links to past work

* Case studies

* Some measure of the contributions made to the TiddlyWiki core

* Some measure of the contributions made to the TiddlyWiki discussion forums

* Perhaps a country of operations for legal purposes

I think we could get something along those lines up and running fairly quickly, and then could evolve it be something more dynamic that could incorporate user feedback.

The Drupal project maintains a marketplace site along the lines I’m describing:

https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services

Best wishes

Jeremy.

[Ste]

Is this something the fission collective pot thing could also be applied to? Can we/ should we push that a bit more? 

[TW Tones]

Ste,

Is this something the fission collective pot thing could also be applied to? Can we/ should we push that a bit more? 

Please elaborate, I do not know to what you refer.

Tones

[Ste]

The tiddlywiki open collective which started up/ is linked with? Tiddlywiki on fission. 

https://opencollective.com/tiddlywiki-on-fission

[Joshua Fontany]

On Friday, May 21, 2021 at 12:41:44 AM UTC-7 Ste wrote:

The tiddlywiki open collective which started up/ is linked with? Tiddlywiki on fission. 

https://opencollective.com/tiddlywiki-on-fission

I wanted to mention this as well. The OpenCollective model looks really good for managing this type of "community pays community for projects" work. 

Best,
Joshua Fontany

[Joshua Fontany]

For example, here is Boris donating money to the TW Open Collective to get a feature funded:

https://talk.fission.codes/t/tiddlywiki-file-upload-plugin-webnative-ipfs-funded/1926

Best,
Joshua Fontany

[Boris Mann]

I got all the video stuff uploaded and managed to ACTUALLY post a mail message announcing this funding after Joshua stole my thunder :P --> https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/21yCCLI0E7s

OpenCollective is a pretty great tool and very flexible. Some background: Jeremy and I agreed to experiment under the "TiddlyWiki on Fission" project name to not have to commit to having a fully "TiddlyWiki" branded open collective all in one go -- to let us experiment a bit. The nice thing is ... if there IS interest in helping to administrate this and build around it, it COULD be transformed into a core TiddlyWiki funding destination.

If you look at the main project page, there are some membership / backer tiers there right at the top: https://opencollective.com/tiddlywiki-on-fission

The new file upload core plugin that Saq is going to work on is a separate project, lower down the page, and also has its own link and can set its own rewards: https://opencollective.com/tiddlywiki-on-fission/projects/tiddlywiki-file-upload -- It has a one-time goal, a company sponsorship tier, and we'll plan to add additional goal for different kinds of backends / savers.

Also, on the "Fission collective pot" -- my idea for that is that backers would help determine who and what to fund. It really can be run as a collective.

Tones -- this perhaps doesn't quite address your needs. With the marketplace that Jeremy suggested, we might surface patreons (or other channels) to directly support creators and contributors. OpenCollective and the community rallying might take a little longer.

I've worked with a lot of open source focused creators and consultants, so I'm also happy to chat with you directly. If anyone ever wants to talk about anything related to open source, licensing, community contributions and so on, I'm happy to connect --> pick a time in my calendar and we'll have a chat https://calendly.com/borismann/global

It may also be helpful to schedule a live video meeting to cover some of these community topics. Let me know how else I can help!

[TW Tones]

Boris,

I would love to discuss this. I am at a pivot point, sadly I suspect I can't build an interest and commissioning process before I must return to the fulltime work force but I may as well proceed. 

I am in the GMT+10 Zone so can I suggest the first meeting may be for you to book me? Rather than me book outside your reasonable times, and so you can choose and as soon as possible opportunity without me setting the time?

Regards

Tones