See the attached dirty mockup.
Statements are a bar on the left. Each person can be subscribed to one
statement in a particular topic. They can be used many ways... e.g. in
Nautilus topic you might set the statement to what you are currently
working on. In the themes discussion you might set your statement to
your current preference for theme. Etc.
Email is based on messages. Chat (IRC, AIM, etc) has many advantages
but tends to be completely unreadable after the fact (try reading a
chat log... very painful). We are going to try and get some of the
cooperative benefits of chat, and then use summarization of the chat
in order to produce content that is viewable by other people. The goal
is to both increase the depth of discussions people have (chat is much
better for this usually) AND to reduce the amount people outside the
discussion feel obligated to read.
So the flow in a topic we are trying to encourage is:
- start a new discussion (or join an existing one by expanding
it... you see them in progress)
- Some subset of discussion participants (or all of them) join
together and start a new comment. Comments are viewable and editable
by all as they are written. Then somebody clicks "Close comment"
(probably after discussing that this is the final comment people want
in the discussion window first). Anybody who edited the comment can
now "Accept" it in order to have their name placed upon it at any
point in time. (A button shows up next to a comment you had a part in
editing but haven't yet taken responsibility for).
- The discussion leading up to the closing of the comment is
archived along with the comment
- Multiple comments can be active for a discussion, which allows
for quick divergence of opinions if people don't want to create a
comment together.
Eventually we should be able to select multiple comments and summarize
them too, but lets just try this for now.
As you might imagine, this model makes the inbox sort of a moot point.
Instead of an Inbox we now want to have a "Stuff that Happened Today"
log... its not expected you'll be able to just read through it, but
it'll have a list of all the topics that had activity. You can then
click on the topics to open them in a new tab (each topic looks sort
of like the mockup there, though I haven't fleshed out the details,
exact look, etc, its just a rough idea, eh?). Open topics then behave
sort of like IRC windows, and their tabs change colour when there is
unread content in them.
Anyway, this should give people plenty of stuff to work on...
-Seth
Attachment:
yarrr-mockup.png
Description: PNG image
