Taiga is too broad. I tried it out with all the best intentions and, quite simply, it is too big. It is too complex and complicated and feels extremely heavy to use.
From decades of professional experience, I know that all forms of planning are performed breadth-first and not depth-first. One jots down a bunch of titles or concepts and delves into them, fleshing them out and adding layers of detail afterwards. Taiga just doesn’t seem to facilitate that workflow.
It is focussed on fixed ideas like “epics” and “user-stories” and its workflow needs one to understand how your planning should fit into those boxes. I never work like that: I don’t know whether a line-item on a scrap of paper is an “epic” or a “story” or just destined to be an item in a bulleted list, somewhere within something else. I don’t want to have to choose what level of the plan the line-item fits before I capture it in my project tracker – I just want to type it up, somewhere, and be able to move it around or promote it or add stuff to it or whatever, later.
In summary: Taiga seems “fine” but just isn’t for me.
We won’t.
It might look likely through the lens that is appropriate for the rest of the “democratic” world but that lens is not reliable for Germany. In the rest of the “democratic” world, the extreme fascists are hidden much like a dirty secret and so any noise from them that slips through is hugely amplified because it signals the existence of a much larger and more significant fascist movement. In Germany, the extreme right are in clear sight and much more of their noise gets through and the lens that amplifies that noise makes it seem that they might win.
That same democracy will ensure that they do not. In Germany, we can see them for what they are and their seats in parliament represent a more accurate measure of their support base. That support base is tragically large and significant but not enough to give them more than seats in parliament: they do not have a majority and would only form a majority through a coalition with other parties and, here, the transparency is a disadvantage: other parties who stand to be part of the next coalition won’t join with the AfD.
Our democracy is not a two-party system. They will not win by jerrymandering or by playing the game. They cannot even sneak power by having a better candidate for key seats because individual seats are won through “first votes” while winning a majority in parliament would require them to take a majority of “second votes” – the system would put those “better” candidates in their seats while correcting the share of seats, overall.
The reason that they are given any space at all is also to their detriment: in Germany, there is exactly one way a political party can be blocked and that is if they contravene the constitution: Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar, usw.
This is why we tolerate their presence and one sees the noise they make: they haven’t – yet – violated that consequentially, and so they cannot be blocked. Blocking the AfD would be great – I’m all for it, in isolation – but it would compromise something about German democracy and the cure would be worse than the disease because it would only silence their noise: the movement would proceed apace and their movement is, itself, a symptom of a greater problem: there are people who are ill served by the status-quo and the AfD seem to be an “alternative.”
If the AfD ever did gain power, however, they simply could not do what they insinuate because that would tear it and the constitutional court would smash them. This is also true if they form part of a coalition: that coalition could not execute on the plans they hint at.
Now, “unantastbar” is a fantastic German word that cannot readily be translated to a single English one but one aspect of it implies immeasurability. The AfD could never pass legislation that discriminated against LGBTQ+ people because that would necessarily divide “people” into two groups and apply a comparator between them and that cannot be done if people’s worth is immeasurable. The constitutional court knows this, as do the defence teams who have surely prepared this argument for the day when it becomes necessary.
Germany is by no means perfect and even German democracy is flawed in some ways but, largely, Germany is a good place to live. There are many archaic laws that persist – the gendered language and gendered baby name things count among a legacy of problems – but, largely, these are being progressively overturned. (Albeit slowly.)
Sometimes, we make a few steps forward and then a few (hopefully fewer) backwards but, largely, I think Germany is on the right track.