This is an edited digest from a post on the TiddlyWiki Google Group.

I am interested in the APPLIED side of TW's as opposed to (or alongside, rather) the technical developments that mostly leave me scratching my head at present (though I have hopes...)

I have been playing with the content of my TiddlyWiki manual for a long time now, but certainly would not claim any specific competencies (at all!) in the programming side of things; rather, it is the APPLICATION of this elegantly different writing format that fascinates me, and what it can bring to real life tasks, like running a team who are trying to do a complex set of tasks better, and in a more joined-up way.

I am fascinated in the way that TW works not just as an *analytical* tool (splitting a complex area up into branches/tags, much as a 'mind map' can do on paper) but that simultaneously it works as an *integrative* tool (linking distant branches/twigs) so that I sometimes envisage the web of information in a TW as being 3-dimensional: Tags spreading out over the surface of a sphere, Links diving through the core to their targets, though of course this is too simple in reality.

Hence I am very interested in rather abstract notions such as "What, precisely (semantically and pragmatically, that is), is a link, and a tag?" and "what does non-linearity offer to the reader and writer that more conventional linear text forms lack? - and what do we risk losing by not having a linear statement of an argument?" Clearly this is a Both-And rather than an Either-Or situation. No doubt others have thought long and hard about these questions already, and I would be most interested if there are any pointers to where I can connect up with this conversation.

There is a seminal paper (1959) in the field of psychoanalysis by a British analyst called Wilfred Bion titled "Attacks on Linking", and to summarise this very complex and dense piece of writing, he is saying that unconscious processes (which might be construed as having a "vested interest" in remaining unconscious) "conspire" to keep apart material that could and probably "should" be linked in the mind ("Don't bore me with the facts, I like my story the way it is!"). I think this goes for a great deal of the different schools of psychology and psychotherapy, as well as the neurosciences, which until recently have ploughed surprisingly separate furrows, without paying very much attention to links that are (or almost certainly should be) present. A generous understanding of this is that researchers have been focussed on their own skills and areas of interests, and that the branches of the "tree of knowledge" have extended out so quickly over the past 100years that common fruits on separate twigs have been easily overlooked, not least because the technology to suggest, explore and make links between, say, cognitive-behavioural theories and those of psychoanalysis, have been lacking. On the other hand, most of us would also recognise that (mainly unconscious) things like envy, empire-building and straightforward protectionism (academic and economic) have played their part, too.

This is very much the theoretical position that IMP (Integrative Multimodal Practice - the therapeutic stance that we are manualizing in TW) tries to take - that paying more conscious attention to the links between theories and practical applications is very powerful in terms of providing a better integrated (and thereby *integrative* for the poor client and family) service. In IMP we do that via two significant routes; firstly by training keyworkers in the basics of a whole range of evidence-based interventions (that have traditionally been "owned" by different professional groups), and secondly by using TW as the manualization allowing/promoting/sustaining this linking, and encouraging local team edits to the manual to create a marriage of "top-down" expert material with "bottom-up" local expertise.

To get back to the point of TiddlyWiki, there seem to be features embedded within TW that suit it quite uniquely for the job:

- its self-contained-ness, so that there can be clear editorial control over content, rather than a free-for-all.
- the ease of basic editing so that non-experts can adopt it ...even technophobes (perhaps a little way to go to fully realise this!)
- the lack of expensive additional (desk- or server-bound) software that any health service would baulk at paying for/maintaining.
- the size of a tiddler; by which I mean that a tiddler is "bite-sized" rather than a full essay, and this makes the document approachable from a user's perspective.