Who is up for a challenge: Family Management Information System

[Farayi Chambati]

Hi Developers,

I have toyed around with creating a Family Management Information system. A few prototypes. Those of you who are parents you will know that it is a big enterprise to run and manage family affairs on a day to day basis.  I have very good ideas on what can be done with Tiddlywiki. However, my limited technical skills are a draw back. I would like to collaborate with a technical brain to create a Tiddlywiki solution to manage a Family. Main domains  to include:  Contacts, Places, Health, Education, Career, Possessions (Houses, Vehicles, Inventory), Community, Documents, Memories - possibly Tasks.

Who is interested. I do notcode but I have product management and business analysis skills.

Best regards,

[Tobias Beer]

Hi Farayi,

I'd recommend casting your ideas into clear (functional) "requirements" as in "With respect to foo, we want our Family Information Thing to do bar so that we can mumble because frotz" and possibly (but not necessarily) respective ideas for (technical) solutions as to how to make the idea work.

I'd start by creating a TiddlyWiki that, first and foremost, serves as a Notebook or manual with tiddlers like:

• About Contacts (About Family, About Friends)
• About Places
• About Health
• About Education
• About Career
• About Possessions (About Houses, About Vehicles, About Inventory)
• About Community
• About Documents
• About Memories
  
• About Birthdays
• About Activityíes

And then you document in each of those precisely what type of information you wish to save alongside records of each kind, whereas a respective record would have the respective tag, e.g. Contact.

In a second step, think about where you want to store any related information / details, e.g.:

• in the tiddler text
• maybe in defined sections
• I very much like definition lists
• in tags
• for modeling a hierarchy
• in fields or list fields, if you want to
• later retrieve stuff in lists
• show things conditionally
• in related tiddlers, incl. DataTiddlers
• for when you don't want to overload a given tiddler
• or when that information / detail is really more of a technical, configuration type
• in sub-tiddlers
• i.e. those that have that tiddler as a tag

The actual records, I would then tag as:

• Contact (Family, Friend)
• Place
• Health
• Education
• Career
• Possession (House, Vehicle, Inventory)
• Community
• Document
• Memory
• Birthday
• Activity

I would conceptualize this Family Thing in the most organic manner possible. You can pre-define all those category tags, but not necessarily. Create, design and define them as you go, as you try to create records for each.

If you want to make cross-lists, you could use something like tobibeer/xlist to create tiddlers like:

• Birthday Memories
• Health Documents
• Contact Memories
• Community Activities
• etc...

Perhaps use some approach that involves prefixes, e.g.

• # for status
  e.g. #next, #future, #waiting
• @ for contexts
  e.g. @vacation, @call, @write, @vacation
• $ for projects statuses
  e.g. $active, $someday, $maybe
• & for contact categories
  e.g. $family, $friends, $professionals
• ! for priorities
  e.g. !high, !medium, !low
• whatever you like, really
  those prefixes help you quickly find stuff

Each category item should have the category as it's tag, e.g. @buy should have Context as a tag and About Context would be tagged About and explain what a Context is and how to work with one´in a tiddler... or link to interesting list-tiddlers involving contexts.

For example, you would tag, Caren Miller, your theoretical sister, with $family, and then a tiddler called Caren's Birthday 2016 tagged #next and Activity and then have a tiddler 2016 Hawai Summer Holidays tagged @vacation but also Caren's Birthday 2016, because you will celebrate her birthday that year in Haway, etc...

To cut that long story short, start filling your own Family Information Thing with life. And if you later feel like it's such a great thing that you wish to share it, abstract and refine some prototype for it into that Family Information Edition. Keep in mind that everyone may have their own preferences and categories to work with. So, it could really just be an instruction manual that writes in simple terms "How to make a great Family Information Thingy with TiddlyWiki." ...rather than a full blown thing with all your personal preferences as to how you would display what.

And whenever you're stuck with an idea, try to spell it out in the most simple, clearly defined terms, each one in its own thread in the groups, e.g.

• As
• A I want...
• B so that
• C because
• D and I tried
• E but somehow
• F isn't working and here's
• G to demonstrate the problem

Something like that. ;-)

Best wishes,

Tobias.

[PJO]

This is an interesting idea. I use TiddlyWiki for personal things (I created TiddlyFolio some years ago for data I wanted to keep locally and didn't want to upload to Lastpass or anywhere else online) but do need to share certain information with my wife about the house, our wills, tax returns, warranties etc. I've played aroud with DokuWiki running on a Synology NAS so far but not really put much in the way of a structure together, so I still have information 

• on paper
  
• in a scanned documents folder on the network
  
• in Lastpass
  
• in Evernote 
  
• in separate TiddlyWikis
  
• in files, emails and email archives indexed with X1(.com)
  
• in notes on my phone
  
• in contact records on Bakail (running on my NAS)
• in calendars (Google, Fastmail) 
  

etc.

That's in addition to photos, music, software etc. on the NAS

My wife is concerned that she wouldn't be able to find or access everything if I dropped dead and I've said don't worry I'm working on it. Meanwhile, we do at least have have good automated backup operations in place. 

A family wiki is definitely something I think would be good to be able to manage using an information sharing tool, like a federated version of Tiddlywiki capable of syncing tiddlers, say between wikis of the same name, the way Dropbox can sync files in folders. I do not wish to share any such information with any commercial provider, so something like OwnCloud or NextCloud running on an Internet-connected Raspberry Pi front ending network storage at home would suit. 

One of the things on my TO DO list is sort out our books. I use a nice app called BookDroid on my phone to keep a record of books I want to buy or borrow. It can scan a barcode and then retrieve full details from the web. I have used it in other people's houses to quickly lift details of things I want to read and would love to be able to transfer the data to TiddlyWiki and add some tags. Our books are more sorted by shelf size than anything else so, partly as a result of moving every so often and partly for lack of time they aren't sorted by topic, never mind cataloged. But a tool to make it trivial is almost there, surely.

This is just a FOR EXAMPLE idea of something I'd be happy to see in a system of the kind you mention. I imagine others would be happy to have records of car maintenance, mileage and expenses and ... one could go on.

[Alfonso Arciniega]

Attached is "The Big Book of Everything" in PDF. I have thought of having a similar FIMS in TiddlyWiki. Maybe some day...

Cheers,

Alfonso

[Farayi Chambati]

Hi Tobias,

It is always a pleasure to pick on your brilliant brain. I appreciate you taking the time to write a detailed honeypot of ideas. This gives me a good headstart. I have a created some working prototype based on my family. I guess I a struggling with abstraction to general a Family Edition or a how to guide for others. The ideas you have shared - will give me a headstart.

Thanks again.

[Farayi Chambati]

That is so my challenge PJO.

[Farayi Chambati]

Thanks for Sharing. I downloaded straight away.

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Dear PJO

> A family wiki is definitely something I think would be good to be able to manage using an information sharing tool, like a federated version of Tiddlywiki capable of syncing tiddlers, say between wikis of the same name, the way Dropbox can sync files in folders. I do not wish to share any such information with any commercial provider, so something like OwnCloud or NextCloud running on an Internet-connected Raspberry Pi front ending network storage at home would suit.

That is exactly the problem that I try to solve in Noteself. Maybe you can check it out: Noteself.github.io
Sync can happen to any commercial couch service or to any custom installation of your choice.

Regards

[PJO]

Thanks. I'd like to take a look at this but it looks as if I need PouchDB and it seems to be down/gone. Any advice?

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello PJO,

El domingo, 25 de septiembre de 2016, 0:43:31 (UTC+2), PJO escribió:

Thanks. I'd like to take a look at this but it looks as if I need PouchDB and it seems to be down/gone. Any advice?

Sorry, I'm not sure that I understand your question completelly. You don't need PouchDB, you need any CouchDB compatible server. This can be an online service such cloudant.com , your own server like your NAS or your server running on a server as a service like heroku, or anything else you want. If you can trust a third party server I recommend you to give cloudant a try, the service is very easy to setup and maintain, and it is fully compatible with NoteSelf.

For any of the services you usually use you need an account somewhere: for using dropbox you need a dropbox account, for using evernote you need an evernote account, for using... you get the idea. For using NoteSelf you can use any couchdb provider.

Regards. 

[PJO]

PouchDB is prominently linked to and is either down or gone. Thanks for the clarification. Maybe you could include that info? 

[Danielo Rodríguez]

Hello PJO

>PouchDB is prominently linked to and is either down or gone

Do you mean that there are several links to pouchdb? It is not gone, it is a live project. If you found any dead link, please let me know which one.

Regards

[PJO]

I clicked on the PouchDB link at the bottom of the web page from which I downloaded Noteself. This gave me a certificate warning and when I proceeded anyway no useful result (site unavailable or something like that). I tried again just now and everything looks ok. I'm seeing the site for the first time.