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.

Along with several of my Osmonaught colleagues, I will be attending OpenTech 2008 in London on Saturday July 5th 2008. It’s a very low cost event (£5 to get in!), and is focussed nicely on the hacker community. I went to the last one in 2005 and had a great time.

This time, I’m giving a talk entitled “TiddlyWiki Tales” which will be a round-up the latest TW developments, both from Osmosoft and the wider community. Later on in the day, my colleague Paul Downey is talking about “The Web as Agreement“.

We’re also holding a competition with a TiddlyWiki flavour and some interesting prizes:

The TiddlyWiki OpenTech competition gives you the chance to win a BUG (plus four modules)! The BUG base station and modules use open source software and snap together to create whatever device you want. There’s also a great second prize of a GP2X Linux powered handheld games console. A stack of O’Reilly books will be the third prize.

For your chance to win one of these great prizes, all you have to do is show us your TiddlyWiki skills. TiddlyWiki is written entirely in javascript, and has a great plugin architecture, so just like the BUG you can twist it to do whatever you want. It can pull in RSS feeds, and because it can be a local file (and you don’t have to worry about same domain policies), it’s great for mashups. There are already 400+ plugins you can use, but don’t let that stop you from writing your own new ones!

(See the Osmosoft site for full details).

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, I started TiddlyWiki back in September 2004. It is now, by many measures, a moderately active and successful open source project. The forums are busy, the ecosystem is vibrant, and many people get a great deal of satisfaction and enjoyment from using TiddlyWiki, improving it, and helping others to do so.

Sometimes, people ask me how they can start a similar project, particularly how they can build an open source project around an idea that they’ve got. For a long time, the question used to make me stop short and give the glib answer that I didn’t know, because it had happened to me by accident. I’m acutely aware that I knew next to nothing about open source until long after I first published TiddlyWiki, and I felt that my experience was so specific to TiddlyWiki that it wouldn’t help anyone else.

Now, though, with the benefit of hindsight, there might by now be a few things I can generalise from my experience. Perhaps. Anyway, I’ll try for three things fairly simple observations for the moment.

1. You have to be fearless, if not reckless. In my case, for the two years or so that I was precariously working full-time on TiddlyWiki, I didn’t earn anything like the money I’d earned in my previous jobs. The only way I could survive was not to put away any money to pay the tax bills that I was building up but to spend everything I was earning on day-to-day living and bills. You can juggle things in the UK so that you don’t pay tax on your income for two years if you’re careful, but my cunning plan was clearly not something that a fully trained accountant would advise anyone to do. Especially given that I had no indication of any future payout that a happy-go-lucky angel investor would recognise, let alone one to impress the friendly tax man. Living hand-to-mouth is never fun, but I got huge motivational sustenance from the enthusiasm of the other people who were putting so much into the project. I reasoned that dozens of strangers wouldn’t be investing in it if TiddlyWiki were without serious merit, and my natural blind optimism filled in the leap that something of serious merit would eventually allow me to pay my bills.

2. You have to build the thing before they will come. An idea alone is not enough. In the case of TiddlyWiki the first proof-of-concept version that I released in September 2004 has around 850 lines of JavaScript code, much more than a trivial proof of concept or a wireframe sketch. I then worked on TiddlyWiki for around 9 months as a pretty much solo effort, driven by the bug reports and feature suggestions that I was receiving. For all of that period, it would have been hard for me to describe TW as an open source project in anything other than license terms (back then there was no subversion repository, no mailing list and no bug tracking system). It was only when TiddlyWiki itself was mature enough to sustain a user community that the demand built up for it to become a proper open source project.

3. You have to make it easy for your users to find and use your source code. In the case of TiddlyWiki, the website is the product is the code is the documentation, which has neatnesses of its own. But there’s more than that: one of the things I’ve learned from working with the TiddlyWiki community is that there are an awful lot of almost-programmers out there: people who couldn’t reliably tell you much about the syntax of JavaScript but have enough wit and common-sense to splice and modify samples of code. Especially if they have the means to try out their changes easily and safely. Give them these tools, and these people can do wonders. In contrast, many open source projects have much more complicated installation, build and execution requirements. It’s often surprisingly hard just to locate the source code and browse your way to a particular part of the codebase.

A great example of how successful TiddlyWiki has been at lowering the barriers to contribution is the Digital Supplement for “Web Campaigning” by Kirsten Foot and Steven M. Schneider” (MIT Press 2006). The authors have published their source materials as a TiddlyWiki file that fellow researchers can download and use to begin their own work, use as a template or indeed study while on an aeroplane. The really interesting thing is the way that Steven assembled their own unique customisation of TiddlyWiki, consisting of a handful of off-the-shelf plugins and one that he wrote himself to handle their unique requirements for footnotes and endnotes. The macro isn’t particularly complicated in programming terms, but it radically simplifies the annotation of data, and demonstrates a beautiful blurring of boundaries between programming and writing.

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.

So, my punishment for being such an intermittent blogger has become clear: I’ve been and broken another rib. This time on a water slide. Not quite as absurdly as three months ago when a particularly fierce cough did for me, but still not exactly heroic. At this rate I should probably stop trying to blog every single breakage and just publish statistics at the end of the year.

So, I was a teenage computer geek. Which is, I guess, how maybe 40 million teenagers might describe themselves today. But back in 1979 when I first got a computer there can only have been a few thousand of us spread across the planet.

The following year, when I was 15, after writing a couple of articles for computer magazines, I was asked to write a book. Soon, I had a proper literary agent, advances, royalties and similar adultness. By the time of my third book when I was 16, I was selling 25,000 copies and earning £30,000 - maybe the salary of a successful estate agent.

When I was 17, I had several books and bits of shrinkwrapped software under my belt. Then, all of a sudden, the media got hold of me. In truth there wasn’t much of a story:

Q. So, you’ve written books about computers. Aren’t they frightfully complicated?

A. Yes.

Q. And you’re only 16. Isn’t that terribly young?

A. Yes.

Q. Um.

I mean, I would try to be more polite, but it did seem a bit odd. Anyway, one embarrassing tidbit from that time is this video, that helpfully preserves some fine comedy hair and jeans for future generations to laugh over:

So, why am I revealing this slightly embarrassing artifact now? Well, after the announcement, I was delighted to get an overwhelmingly positive response, with only a couple of (entirely reasonable) questions. The questions were kind of about my intentions, and how things were going to unfold over the future. The sort of stuff that people who know me well would have a fair idea about. So I figured the best way to answer those questions is to start to make a bit more effort to show who I am, and where I came from.

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.

So, my Mum has an online exhibition of her art which fills me with filial pride:

She uses a vector graphics application called Xara Xtreme to create almost all of her work (it’s a bit of an overlooked gem, and British to boot; I regularly use it on my Mac via Parallels).

Thanks for the kind comments on my breakage, much appreciated. Besides feeling embarrassed at borderline self-pity, I’m feeling a whole heap less sorry for myself, and rather instead feeling awed by the recuperative power of the human body. I can’t quite see when a poor rib gets a chance to do any healing, but it seems to be getting better quite quickly. The odd thing is the way that after feeling rubbish, the respite of feeling merely worse-than-usual actually ends up leaving you basking like you’ve won some kind of health premium. Sort of like the way it feels more silent than usual after a loud noise.