This page started off as a conversation about the Bugs page on AsteroidMeta, but I think it could grow into a bigger and more useful discussion of the features of an ideal collaboration tool.
Is it really necessary to use Bugzilla for Noösphere? I'd personally like it if all the bugs could be tracked here. But then again, I'm not a Noösphere developer, so I don't really get a vote. --jcorneli
I find wiki to be a very poor platform for almost any workflow marginally more complex than document co-editing. This especially includes bug/issue tracking. I only grudgingly use it for discussion functionality, even. --akrowne
This makes me wonder why I'm such a big fan of wikis, and what the difference is between wiki and things you like better. I think it would great if Noösphere had all the elements in it that would make it possible to use it as a workflow management tool, flexibly enough to handle lots of different workflow needs; at that point perhaps it would be worthwhile to make AM into a Planet. But the specific elements of the design you and I imagine being useful might be pretty different. I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts on the matter! --jcorneli
Well, for one thing, I think it would be great if the tool could be interacted with through a non-web interface (say, email). For example, I'd like to be able to send an email request that says "what are my objects?" and get back a list, then another email that says "send me object number 2" and get back an email with the source code for object number 2, or an email that says "send me all my objects" and get one email with all the objects in it. I'd like there to be a "batch" mode for just about every action - so that I could create multiple objects, submit multiple corrections, update or create multiple webpages, assign multiple tasks to myself or change their status, rate other people's work, etc.
I realize that "browsing" wouldn't necessarily be so easy, but then again… it wouldn't take much for me to write a function in emacs that said "request the page linked to at point" and presto, I've followed a hyperlink.
The reason for casting this vote for drastic simplicity is that that I don't like waiting for webpages to load or having to worry about interface issues. I want to be able to use an interface that suits me. With a text-based, email-facilitated interface, everything becomes eminently scriptable. That means a lot of time savings and more productivity and more fun. --jcorneli
Another very useful thing is to have descriptions of what people are doing in the system. Arch has this and Wikis have this – you know, the summary line! But how many times have I forgotten what I was in the middle of coding, or over-written a working version of a program with an experimental version? Way too many. So I think the ideal system would strongly emphasize keeping track of this sort of metadata: when you check out a file, you should optionally say what you are thinking of doing with it; when you check it back in, you should definitely say what you did do with it. --jcorneli
Auto-linking and such is very important. The wiki is fairly weak at that. To assign a new task for myself, for example, I need to edit my user page, the Tasks page, and and the task itself. To clear out a finished task, I need to edit my user page, the Tasks page, the Case Closed page and probably the task itself again too. It would be much better if all this stuff could be accomplished through one action, with appropiate check-boxes or fields -- "Assign-Task-To: (default self)", "Task-Status: (default open)", "Task-In-Project: (default Users-Main-Project)" – and appropriate behavior; the task would be listed in the right place, people working on the task would be listed below the task description, etc. --jcorneli Wed Feb 23 16:02:28 2005 UTC
It is somewhat interesting that the CommunityWiki:ChoosingAWiki page says that many people who think they want a wiki might actually prefer Noosphere. (The full quote is worth reading too, so check it out!) This is interesting in part because CommunityWiki uses the same wiki engine as AsteroidMeta.
The main thing that they talk about as an advantage of Noosphere is the "ownership" feature. It is certainly a very noticeable feature, but there are plenty of other interesting features too – including the highly notable autolinking feature.
There is a huge list of wikis, though, and perhaps some of them also offer interesting worthwhile or novel features: here is the list -- http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiEngines – maybe there isn't much excitement there, I can't say.
Anyway, I have to agree that ownership has had an interesting, and probably overall-positive, effect on the course of PlanetMath so far. But I think there are some other features that could really make people prefer Noosphere to wikis. There are just so many good ideas out there - it would be great if Noosphere could incorporate them all. Probably that is too much to ask - but it would be nice if the "Noosphere-based system" did incorporate all the useful things, in a very well integrated way. --jcorneli Mon Feb 28 05:30:51 2005 UTC
Also:
OK… that might have taken a bit of a personal turn.
Here's another thing that would be good: intelligent name-space management. On a wiki, everything shares the same namespace. So if I create a page proof of theorem 3, everyone else who has a "theorem 3" is out of luck. OK, maybe it would be better to give theorem 3 a name, and make the link say proof of foobar theorem but still! Sharing one namespace can be kind of lame.
Oddwiki has hacked Oddmuse so that there is a different namespace and recent changes page for each of their child wikis. That is cool. I think it might be good if Noösphere had the same sort of feature. But this is getting back into the mode of the [[A_scholium-based_document_model_scholia?]] stuff I was talking about, where each page would have many attachments, to be handled with different behavior depending on their type. In that model, there is only one namespace, but it is handled more automatically - object159726 might be something you'd see in that namespace, for example. You would have to be able to "find" object159726 by looking at its metadata and the metadata of other objects that are near by. --jcorneli
It would be nice (at least for the end user, at least I think so) to synch documents via rsync instead of uploading and downloading the whole text you want to edit all at once (like wikis currently do). This might get a little complicated in cases where multiple users can edit the same page, however, if there is just one object editor (the owner), then there is only one authoritative version of the file to sync to. --jcorneli
How about using darcs (a revision control system: http://abridgegame.org/darcs/)? It supports managing fine-grained text patches, and we would get revision control for free. Of course all Wikis and noosphere already have a primitive revision control, but it is worth consideration if you want to implement one from scratch. Unlike CVS or Subversion, darcs works with relatively dumb servers, and so I think can be modified to work over a Web service protocol. (i.e. HTTP POST) It already has a command-line interface, so that's good for power users. I myself would prefer to (and already do) maintain copies of every PlanetMath entry I own on my local system, because it's easier to edit them that way. (Better editors, can view graphics, not slow.) (And yes, one of the ambitious goals I have for my literate programming system is to support collaborative editing over the network. Let's see if I can pull that one off.) – SteveCheng
I'm glad you're working on this; I'd also appreciate it if you'd talk about this literate programming system with us (me in particular) a bit more. Since I'm also working on something similar, it may be that we'll be able to collaborate. --jcorneli
Well, at this point I have little concrete to talk about, but I've noted by ideas in the Display LaTeX page. --SteveCheng