[Chicago] Collaborative Editors, was Re: code review tools

[Luke Opperman]

(Aside to Andrew/Atul: a year+ after that posting, do you still make a lot
of use of collaborative editing for recording group talk and crystallizing
it into more cohesive documents?)

[Typos cleaned up, obvious asides removed.]

12:35 PM  me: this post that Andrew just pointed out on the chipy list is a
good summary/direction from our "how do we *talk* better" conversations back
at textura.
http://www.humanized.com/weblog/2006/04/19/moonedit_to_the_rescue/
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17 minutes12:53 PM  Chad:I'd have to try it. I like the idea of multiple
inputs into a computer. But shared editing seems, i don't know. I wonder if
the key to moonedit is the search and editing features or its collaborative
nature or if the concurrent editing is really the key. But good stuff.
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10 minutes1:05 PM  me: i have a notion of unix "talk" with the separating
line removed... our chats here often take on that write-respond-rewrite
flow, but without the ability to actually go back and edit - whereas talk
had the opposite problem of showing revision clearly but not showing
history. see also, the use of ^H written out to represent explicit
rethought.
1:09 PM perhaps novel to collabedit though: having a natural third role
(filled by anyone not actively conversing) of editing the overall movement
of the conversation by choosing and arranging highlights as they occur or
are recognized.
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7 minutes1:16 PM  me: also clearly addresses the space i'm curious to fill
in a lot of our maillist / groups threaded discussions, where it's easy to
lose sight of the larger picture as we snip bits to reply to and follow
sub-thoughts. real-time wiki collaboration with the persistence / time-delay
that a smooth transition between chat and email provides.

 ------------------------------
39 minutes 1:58 PM Chad: third role seems interesting. we'll call it copy
editor as that is the closest real world equivalent I think.
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12 minutes2:11 PM  Chad: I agree about the need to transition things easier.
chat -> email -> wiki or just publishing chats or email threads like you can
a google notebook. A research file or something like when writing a paper or
book. You have notes. And interviews. And biblo info.
  Maybe people just need to hire more editors. =)
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21 minutes 2:32 PM  me: publishing chats/emails brings up the unavoidable
question of how we'll deal with permission - not all that naturally handled
today with single-author, only implicit broad strokes for multi-author.
2:33 PM say I want to publish this chat session as a response to the Chipy
post that started it.
2:35 PM or more likely, want to lightly edit it first. what conventions or
encoding of intent improves on explicit requests-per-document, which might
work with a two person chat but presumably scales miserably.
2:36 PM Creative Commons gives a good start at the language for talking
about redistribution and derivative works etc
2:40 PM so the top-level shift is in realizing that all the various pieces
that make up my daily content-stream should be versioned, should be
publishable, should be permissionable. (and that part of my content-stream
is the recursively-meta-information about what I'm reading, who I'm talking
to, when I published something...)
2:43 PM Chad :I think the permissions might be deducible(sp) based on
context. Everything from the Chipy article is ok. But I'd like to block the
segue into personal or side notes as part of conversation.
2:45 PM But then again, maybe it is just a multi-layered chat. topic in
black, tangent in green. I personally like to leave the subject vague and
ambiguous but that's just for fun. Personal comments in red.
2:47 PM me : right, that's the slight editing I'm talking about. and yeah,
it could probably be deducible with minimal input, coding (as you say, by
color), or perhaps if there were a side channel to create stronger
replying-to-linkages (contextual theme-tagging?)
2:48 PM cf an extension of irc's "name:" prefixing to identify sub-threads.
2:49 PM Chad : yeah, I like the irc level with software support.
2:51 PM  me: alternatively, a lot of this problem might go away if the
context is more explicit in collaborative editing, in that we'd be having
the "brainstorm about collaborative editing" thread in a document that
started there, and still have our personal chat clearly personal. another
parallel, the side-channel irc chats alongside a more formal presentation or
talk.
2:52 PM ie, perhaps this is all a side-effect of the flaws of just-email or
just-chat.
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