The Interledger Community 🌱: Josh Senyak

Tembo, the easy web database builder — Grant Report #2

Josh Senyak — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 06:36:08 +0000

Project Update

The prototype version of Tembo is complete and ready for download and experimentation! Download here

Some 650 hours of development and 9500 lines of code after the project began in October, we have the bones of a free, open-source product that could prove wildly useful... and point the way to using web monetization to support open-source software development

Tembo is a WordPress plugin that lets you build relational database applications quickly and easily. You publish these applications as new WordPress plugins. You can use your newly-built plugin immediately on your own site; even better, you can distribute it to the world so that anybody can benefit from your work. A DJ can create software to keep track of music and gigs. A group of social activists can organize articles, books, authors and interventions. An independent bookstore can track titles and special offers. A volunteer group can organize donations, pickups and food boxes.... All of these applications, once built, can be instantly available to others.

Our release of Tembo is version 0.0.1, a proof-of-concept version. It walks you through a quick and painless development process, using a step-by-step interview model. When the process is complete (and this could take as little as twenty minutes), you click the "build" button and Tembo creates your new application as a ready-to-activate WordPress plugin. Version 0.0.1 shows how easy the interview process can be. The plugins generated by this version are not yet full-featured (for one thing, they don't yet offer data entry forms), but they show off custom data schemas, a menuing system, search forms, role-based permissions, and clean install/uninstall.

A point of great interest for the Grants for the Web community: Tembo implements a unique two-leveled web monetization model. The developer who uses Tembo to build software can monetize that software simply by adding a token when prompted. At the same time, the developer is asked whether the original Tembo team should receive some benefit from that monetization. If the developer agrees, she then determines the percentage to go to the Tembo team, using a slider to choose anything from 10% to 100%. Erika D. at Interledger pointed us to this article by Ben Sharafian, which gave the wonderfully simple idea of sharing revenue by probabilistic assignment of respective pointers.

Web monetization is an intriguing topic for open-source software development. The modern economy truly runs on open-source software, and yet the models for rewarding open-source engineers are still far from clear and stable. Tembo experiments with one way that software developers can be compensated (perhaps in multiple levels) through web monetization.

Progress on objectives

Set up infrastructure for developing Tembo as an open-source project

This involved setting up a project website and a GitHub repository. Both are complete and ready for expanded community participation.

Attract early adopters to the project.

After attending a number of community events and talking to open-source initiators, it became pretty clear that the best way to attract early adopters would be to publish an early, viable version of the software as proof-of-concept. With that version now complete, we can begin to make a more compelling case to potential partners.

Release an early viable version of Tembo

Now complete!

Support developers in using Tembo to create monetized, web-enabled database applications

The 0.0.1 version of Tembo is best considered a demo version; it's not yet ready for developers to build fully functional applications. The challenges of building software that builds software turned out to be somewhat more formidable than expected. Consider the problem of fixing software bugs. It's not enough to fix the code in the built software; one most go one level of abstraction further, to find and correct the error in the mother code that created the error in the daughter code.

Promote Tembo through conference workshops, forums, blog posts and at least one white paper

2020 was not a banner year for shmoozing. We attended a number of excellent conferences in their covid-year online incarnations, including All Things Open, WordCamp, OpenSource 101, DevSummit and MozFest. These provided a wealth of insight, information and new connections. Unfortunately, the spontaneous side-chat experiences (which are really the most important part of conferences) are all but lost in the online versions. We're hoping for many chances to promote Tembo now that live conferences are beginning to return, especially now that we have a real product to show off.

Documentation & lessons learned

Still to come! The initial version of the software has only just been published, so now is the time for the documentation part of the cycle.

Key activities

Coding, coding, coding, and coding. Javascript, PHP, CSS, and of course WordPress - in this case not (as so many people consider it) as a blogging platform, but as a software development platform.

The entire project is licensed as open source under GNU GPL 3.0, so every bit of the code is freely available for inspection, derivation and improvement.

Some of the grant period has been devoted to outreach. We attended a number of conferences (all online, given the covid-19 pandemic) on open-source software and community technology, in order to learn and share ideas. We developed the nice-looking Tembo website and our GitHub repository as entryways to potential partners in developing and publicizing the Tembo project.

In fact, though, much the greatest share of grant activity has gone into developing Tembo as solid, well-considered software. We had originally hoped to recruit open-source software engineers as contributing partners early on. But the eventual learning was rather that open-source developers want some concrete idea of the project they're working on. Since open-source developers often (though by no means exclusively) work on a volunteer basis, the project must be compelling and attractive enough to draw their interest. Now that we have a strong proof-of-concept we can begin to build a development community.

Communications and marketing

See discussion in sections above. Given the unexpected intensity of the software development process, and the challenges of broad contact during lockdown, we focused more on software engineering in the grant period, and look forward to more communication and marketing in months ahead.

What’s next?

So much more ahead!

Presentations and demonstrations at conferences, meetups, etc.
Recruitment of partners interested in software development, graphic design, documentation, outreach
A truly useful version 1.0.0 of Tembo and submission to WordPress for inclusion on the WordPress plugin site
A brief, lively video describing and demonstrating Tembo
Comparison charts: feature comparisons with tools like Google Sheets, Google Forms, Zoho Creator, Airtable, Microsoft Access, REDCap
Looking for funding opportunities to continue the work at full speed.

What community support would benefit your project?

I would love help with:

Connection with interested partners, whether in software development or project development
Links to funding opportunities
Big-picture musings on directions and opportunities

Additional comments

This has been a great project. I loved the chance to do this work. A big thank you to Coil and the Grant for the Web staff and community.

Several recipients from one monetized resource?

Josh Senyak — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 02:59:54 +0000

Technical question! Is there any way to set up a monetized web page so that there are multiple recipients, with payments split amongst them?

Or is the protocol such that the payment always accrues to one and only one payment pointer?

If there's documentation that explains the exact specifications of monetization, please refer me. The draft report at https://webmonetization.org/specification.html is nice & technical, but

since it's a proposal, I'm not sure it reflects how things actually work currently, and
I'm not sure it answers the question above about multiple recipients.

Thanks much for any thoughts.

Tembo — Grant Report #1

Josh Senyak — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 19:48:14 +0000

Some snapshots from work in progress...

Project Update

Tembo development is off and running. The road proved more challenging than the starry-eyed proposal foresaw (I'm sure I'm the only GFTW grantee who's had that experience). For example, open source software development takes a great deal of community-building - something that isn't quick and easy even when we're all able to network and engage at in-person conferences and meet-ups. Since this is my first time launching an OSD project there's been a lot to learn.

But we have mounted our GitHub repository (more learning!) and, more importantly, completed the functional design document that describes exactly how the software will work.

We're now in the head-down coding phase. Very excited to release version 1.0.0 soon!

Time has been an issue, since the project timeline was very aggressive (and "we" is a euphemism for what's essentially a one-man shop). The good news is that the decks are now clear and development is proceeding at speed.

Progress on objectives and activities

Project goals and progress so far:

Set up infrastructure for developing Tembo as an open-source project. The GitHub repository was the central infrastructure, but in truth there's a lot of human interaction needed to get people involved.
Attract early and early adopters to the project. Created the project website, which should serve as a useful tool for marketing. Learning: since this application is quite innovative in concept (a WordPress plugin that builds other Wordpress plugins!), we will need at least a prototype version of the software in order to attract believers and contributors.
Release an early viable version of Tembo. Coming up!
Support developers in using Tembo to create monetized, web-enabled database applications. That will come later, once the software is released and publicized and we attract our early adopters.
Promote Tembo through conference workshops, forums, blog posts and at least one white paper. Some good conferences attended included All Things Open, NPDevSummit Oakland, WordCamp LA. More to come after there's software to show off.
Documentation & lessons learned. We're using both the website and the GitHub repo for documentation. This includes non-technical story-telling for the development process and formal documentation of the software's functional design.

Communications and marketing

We've built the necessary landing points (repo, project website) and done some initial networking with developers and allies. Now the job is to finish the software and documentation, put out the product, and then return to the communications trail more intensively to raise interest in something tangible.

What’s next?

Keep documenting the process with engaging story-telling
Complete the software prototype
Create a short, intriguing video showing exactly how Tembo can meet real-world needs
Technical documentation
Communications, marketing and user support.

What community support would benefit your project?

How to build an open source development community from scratch? (Have some great resources on this, but it's always great to talk directly with people who have done it)
How to reach potential end users?

Additional comments

I would love comments and feedback froom the GFTW community on any of the sites and documents listed above. Thanks for reading this far!

What do you think of Tembo?

Josh Senyak — Fri, 05 Feb 2021 22:21:51 +0000

Tembo, my project for GFTW, is an open-source application that lets you build monetized web database applications quickly and easily. It's implemented as a WordPress plug-in and it creates applications which are also WordPress plug-ins, making them very easy to share, install and update.

I've just posted a "functional description" of Tembo on the project's GitHub repository:
Tembo functional description v1

I would love the community's feedback on this document! We're already in the coding phase so any quick comments, large and small, are very welcome. (In-depth comments are even more welcome, but that's a lot to ask.)

This is my first time initiating an open-source development project, so if you have any experience with open source development I'm especially grateful for your thoughts.

Let's talk about open source

Josh Senyak — Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:20:30 +0000

My GFTW grant involves a new open source project. Now the confession - I've never launched my own open source software project before. In fact I've never even contributed to an existing open source project.

To start my learning process, I attended open-source-related sessions at recent conferences: All Things Open, WordCamp, and Aspiration Tech's Dev Summit. Then I read the online book Producing Open Source Software (https://producingoss.com/en/), which I found very good.

Please give a shout-out in this thread if your GFTW project is open source, or if you're willing to share some wisdom with those of us are. Thanks!