[TW5] Suggestion?

[Carlos Wang]

Hi All,

I've just decided to try TiddlyWiki as a personal wiki because I wanted to setup a wiki/html file for each individual project I have. I looked at the capabilities and plugins for it and it looks very impressive! My intent is to put any project wiki on the cloud (via dropbox) so I can sync it with android.

So far all of the comments I've read about it have been that it is fairly good to use, except it is not compatible with collaborative projects, so hence some people sort of shy away from it and try dokuwiki/mediawiki instead for work related activities. I really do like the self-contained modular design of TiddlyWiki on the other hand, but I can foresee a scenario where one or two projects can go from a solo to collaborative, and was wondering if TiddlyWiki would (or have already?) have the capacity to allow for that to happen? So far the current path would be to: 1) make a change, 2) upload to cloud/server, 3) notify collaborators about the change, 4) collaborators take turn making changes. I do not know how will Tiddly works with github/svn.

It was really after reading up on the plugin TiddlyMap that really drew me in - and it got me thinking, what if more than one user can draw on a given mindmap at the same time? Imagine starting up a meeting, creating a new tiddlywiki given a specific meeting date or topic, and then everyone are adding tiddlers as they discuss their project during a meeting while someone arranges the tiddlers in the form of a mind map for the others to see. Each of them can add tiddlers either by copying tiddlers from their personal wiki or creating a new one on the fly. And then in the end everyone has that version of the meeting minutes.

Right now I think most visualization tiddler plugins requires a moderate amount of programming to show decent visuals, but TiddlyMap seems to bypass all of that through a neat little GUI, which I believe helps a lot for notetaking and jotting down thoughts.

Any thoughts (I am quite certain you guys have already looked into this, if so, please forgive the text)? I think the idea itself can be extremely difficult to do depending on whether the collab is done in real-time or perhaps in "time-chunks".

Cheers,

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Carlos,

I think the recently invented TiddlyWiki Federation approach may eventually cater for that need, assuming you have ONE project "wiki lead" that will eventually PULL updates from different (trusted) sources... in a way that displays modifications / inserts / (not sure about deletion => once Jed has set up a repo, we can add that as an "idea issue" to consider the options for that).

All in all, the "federation" workflow will have...

• one "wiki master" managing the "original" / public / team wiki
  
• a number of contributors
• the "master" pulling updates from "contributor editions" on a regular basis => actively, not automagically
• some UI that allows to gracefully do revisions on new / updated stuff

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Carlos,

So far all of the comments I've read about it have been that it is fairly good to use, except it is not compatible with collaborative projects, so hence some people sort of shy away from it and try dokuwiki/mediawiki instead for work related activities.

Yap, I agree that is an issue for many people. Jeremy wants to tackle that (see "Multiuser" in his roadmap: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/tiddlywiki/vfdL5hwf7KM/hfQIlGCTEwAJ).

Also Jed came up with a very promising idea/prototype for sharing tiddlers between wiki in a peer2peer way.

 

It was really after reading up on the plugin TiddlyMap that really drew me in -

Great to hear that :)
 

and it got me thinking, what if more than one user can draw on a given mindmap at the same time? Imagine starting up a meeting […]

Here is what is possible with TiddlyMap (and how) and what is not:

Scenario 1 - A wiki is hosted on a server and all meeting participants work on the same wiki and thus on the same mind map.

Not possible at the moment: The main problem here is that TW is not a multiuser client-server app that instantly syncs changes to the clients. An explanation There are several mind-map/concept-map tools out there that allow you to create maps simultaneously together and what makes it work, is that the map is centrally hosted. Like in an online game, each client sends data about its actions to the server and the server updates the map and sends back the new map to all other clients. This way all clients can see and interact with the same version.

So if TiddlyWiki became a multi-user server where changes are instantly synced to all other clients (with no delay) then there is a good chance to make this possible at some point. For TiddlyMap, this would only mean to rebuild its caching policy (so that the cache is rebuild when external changes arrive from the server).

Scenario 2 - A wiki is not hosted on a server and all meeting participants work on their own wiki with different mind maps being kept in sync.

An attempt to synchronize maps here would be extremely difficult. In contrast to a server solution (scenario 1), a peer2peer synchronization (e.g. using the TW "federation" paradigm) will not work out of the box for tiddlymap as the users would not operate on the same wiki hosted by a single server, but on completely different wikis having different views, styles, positions, edge types etc. This means that conflicts can arise if two users try to operate on the same data. With a server, this cannot happen because it is first-come first-serve.

Scenario 3 - A wiki is not hosted on a server and all meeting participants create tiddlers but only one person is responsible for creating a map.

That would work extremely fine with the "federation" idea. All participants would just need to tag their tiddlers e.g. "meeting1" and the mind map creator would just pull the tiddlers from the participant's wikis at the end of the meeting and assemble the map. Without "federations", the moderator could still do it by asking all participants to export their tiddlers tagged with "meeting1" and put them in a dropbox. The moderator would then need to import them and create the map.

Scenario 4 - Face2face meeting + projector

By the way, in a face2face meeting, you could use a projector and TiddlyMap in fullscreen mode ;)

Right now I think most visualization tiddler plugins requires a moderate amount of programming to show decent visuals, but TiddlyMap seems to bypass all of that through a neat little GUI, which I believe helps a lot for notetaking and jotting down thoughts.

Thanks for the feedback. Hope to release v0.11.0 soon which contains a lot of fixes and improvements (see https://github.com/felixhayashi/TW5-TiddlyMap/issues for more infos).

-Felix

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Felix,

I'm thinking your list is better "served" in reverse. ;-)

Scenario 4 - Face2face meeting + projector

By the way, in a face2face meeting, you could use a projector and TiddlyMap in fullscreen mode ;)

This is how I would advise to do it. Could be in an room, but could very well also be online, via video conferencing, assuming the one to handle the map is apt for the job of:

• navigating while not irritating participants with too much of it
• live-editing notes / nodes, i.e. writing down the essence

Scenario 3 - A wiki is not hosted on a server and all meeting participants create tiddlers but only one person is responsible for creating a map.

That would work extremely fine with the "federation" idea.  

Not sure if everyone needs to have a wiki editor in front of themselves.

All participants would just need to tag their tiddlers e.g. "meeting1" and the mind map creator would just pull the tiddlers from the participant's wikis at the end of the meeting and assemble the map. Without "federations", the moderator could still do it by asking all participants to export their tiddlers tagged with "meeting1" and put them in a dropbox. The moderator would then need to import them and create the map.

While that is a possibility, I think a "MindMap" is something that begs for being "developed" in real-time... not as an "I send you a message with my ideas" type of thing.

Scenario 2 - A wiki is not hosted on a server and all meeting participants work on their own wiki with different mind maps being kept in sync.  

 

An attempt to synchronize maps here would be extremely difficult.  

Indeed, that does not sound ideal either. There is just soooo much room for (merge) conflicts.

Scenario 1 - A wiki is hosted on a server and all meeting participants work on the same wiki and thus on the same mind map.

Not possible at the moment

Actually, it is: If you do some hangout and have one person be the editor / host. I mean, it's cool that you can have multiple persons work on a google docs document. Not sure if we're at the stage of aspiring for that just yet.

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[Felix Küppers]

Hi Tobias,

thanks for the remarks. Strangely, I hadn't thought about the option
that one moderator shares a screen on a hangout with a map in fullscreen
and the other people drop in ideas. Thanks for mentioning it, it is a
great idea :)

> Indeed, that does not sound ideal either. There is just soooo much
> room for (merge) conflicts.

That was exactly what I was getting at. It would require a highly
intelligent merging and syncing mechanism, I mean, it would be a
nightmare if users were asked all the time "How to resolve this conflict?".

> While that is a possibility, I think a "MindMap" is something that

> begs for being "developed" in real-time... not as a "I send you a

> message with my ideas" type of thing.

I agree, exporting / importing tiddlers is more than suboptimal for
brainstorming sessions.

-Felix