Moving into TiddlySpace

These are exciting days as the AMBIT tiddlymanual is moved from it's second home, TiddlyWeb, into it's third one - which is it's ultimate destination, really. You can have a look at http://ambit.tiddlyspace.com, or you can see some of the local versions via the same 'signposting' site - www.tiddlymanuals.com

TiddlySpace works - albeit a bit clunkily in places so far - but with a bit of imagination you can see what this might start to look like.

TiddlySpace is a web service that allows you to open a 'Space' which is in effect a simple, self-editable wiki - a tiddlywiki, of course. But there is more. Your wiki, comprising a collection of 'notelets' (tiddlers) offers a place to curate your own content, and even to hold draft contact back from publication (every tiddler has two possible states - public or private - the latter being visible only to you when you are logged in as a member of that space), and you can invite close trusted colleagues to share any space you open (you can open as many as you want). So far so good. Being tiddlywiki, at a click you can of course download the whole wiki and run it from a USB stick, etc, without being on the web at all.

The really wonderful bit comes when another person, or small trusted group, decides to open their own space, to curate their own material... They can choose to "include" all of the public content from my Space inside their own. Any content thus included is still clearly marked as mine, and I still manage its content. However, by including my public content in her Space, a collaborator of mine can add her own details, local additions, or overwrite sections of my wiki where she has local material that fits her situation better, etc. She doesn't erase my own curated content, just replaces it within her own in her Space, in such a way that it is explicit that this is her over-written material, and so that the reader can toggle back and forth between the two versions - hers and mine.

As many people as want to can include someone elses' Space in their own, and they can include as many Spaces as they want to in their own Spaces... This is an extraordinarily fecund way of sharing, digesting, reworking and re-sharing ideas and expertise. Where Facebook is all surface - Face - TiddlySpace is all depth, meaning, accuracy, understanding - MindBook, if you like.

In terms of my biopsychosocial treatment manuals, you can see how this technical capacity supports the notion of a balance between a centrally-curated 'Core Template' and multiple local iterations of this methodology, with their own super-added attunements - a co-construction or collaborative authoring of content becomes simple to achieve; principles and variants of local praxis, recorded in a way that other workers can easily browse different variants and choose the most suitable local attunement for their specific needs. We are only making explicit what every team adopting a manualized treatment protocol does - and come formal (randomized controlled) trials of a method of working it is easy enough to 'switch off' the editing function...

It's is easier to see and play than to explain. AMBIT

Thanks to our Comic Relief Grant, and the support of the James Wentworth Stanley fund, we are also able to invest in programming time to iron our glitches and make huge improvements to the user interface, and navigation, which has, to date, been pretty chronic. Please check in over the coming months as things should be improving in quantum leaps before May 2011.