Treat with Jermolene

The organisers have posted the video from the talk that I gave at the Next08 conference in Hamburg earlier this month. It doesn’t seem to be possible to link directly to the video; you’ll need to scroll down until you find “Jeremy Ruston”:

http://www.next-conference.com/next08/program.html

I was a bit more nervous than usual because I was standing in at short-ish notice for my boss. I added some laconicity, but the material is essentially his, as you can see in this video of JP giving the talk last December at LeWeb 3 in Paris. Osmosoft helped out with the slides, using RippleRap and TiddlyWiki to maintain my strict PowerPoint quarantine.

Happily at least one person liked it.

So, I’ll be attending BlogTalk 2008 next week in Cork, along with most of the Osmosoft contingent. I’ll be running a brief demo of some of the latest TiddlyWiki wizardry, and we’ll have a little exhibition stand too. Being a webby sort of conference, we’re running a RippleRap server so that people can create and share notes about the conference sessions (regardless of the state of the wifi!).

I went to BlogTalk 2006 in Vienna as an independent hacker, and thoroughly enjoyed my first exposure to a crowd of people who are generally at the forefront of thinking about social software. Thomas and John do a tremendous job of bringing people together, and so I’m delighted that this time around BT are one of the sponsors of the event.

So, next Thursday at 10am, I’m presenting a workshop about TiddlyWiki at BT’s offices in Adastral Park near Ipswich - better known to geeks as Martlesham Heath. It’s mostly an internal BT event open but we can accommodate a limited number of external visitors. I know it’s short notice, but if anyone out there is able to come along, you’d be very welcome - leave a comment here, or drop me an email.

I’m delighted to announce that the mighty BT has acquired my tiny little company Osmosoft Limited. I’m joining BT as Head of Open Source Innovation, and I’ll be building a crack open source web development team called BT Osmosoft. To say the least, this is big news for me personally, and I hope will have a positive and lasting impact on the future of TiddlyWiki.

BT is becoming a remarkable thing: a truly internet-scale consumer company that doesn’t rely on owning “secret sauce” software for it’s business. At the most senior levels, there’s an appetite to embrace open source that wouldn’t disgrace a web 2.0 startup. I’ll be working with a great many talented and interesting people, and I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Meanwhile, TiddlyWiki has benefited from something rather magical: a global community of eager people who have gathered around it and generously contributed to it, striving to make it better in a spirit of good-natured sharing. I’m regularly astonished by the inventiveness and resourcefulness of this community; I feel a part of something much bigger and more significant than I could ever manage on my own.

I’ve always kept TiddlyWiki fiercely independent — for instance, not carrying advertising (or indeed accepting venture capital investments). I feel that to do anything else would be disrespectful to the grass roots users and enthusiasts who make TiddlyWiki so useful and intriguing. Now that I’m taking up a commercial position it’s necessary to take certain steps to enshrine that independence more formally.

I have therefore legally assigned my copyrights in TiddlyWiki to an open, non-profit foundation called UnaMesa. I think that TiddlyWiki is at once too fragile and too important to be wholly owned by any one player in the ecosystem; common ownership allows everyone to work together on a level-playing field. There’s a lot more to say about UnaMesa, and I’ll return to it in a later post.

I’m looking forward to being able to improve some areas of TiddlyWiki that have not received enough attention in the past - like a better plugin catalogue, automated testing, better accessibility, and easier security. This won’t be by BT taking over the project, but rather by supporting the open source process and helping out with resources when and where it can.

I hope BT’s endorsement of TiddlyWiki will open up new applications that we haven’t thought of yet. To meet the challenges that they bring, I’ll continue to strive to keep the core of TiddlyWiki true to it’s origins as a lean, efficient non-linear personal web notebook.