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Everybody's right in that it's a) not free, b) not an open protocol, and c) not a huge quantum leap past message boards, but I gotta tell you: I was interested

by crux 17y ago

Everybody's right in that it's a) not free, b) not an open protocol, and c) not a huge quantum leap past message boards, but I gotta tell you: I was interested in this anyway because I am desperate at this point. I am so sick of email—a dozen individual messages being sent one at a time between one person and another, out of multiple participants, somehow magically supposed to be forming a single conversation; people sending individual copies of a document, editing them, then replying all with a new version, et cetera. It's maddening. So, what do people do? Generally speaking, one's coworkers are simply not going to sign up for a web app if it's not simple and obvious to them. Email is easy. What tools DO people use like this, to create centralized, threaded conversations, that don't require you to create a new account or pay $6 a month for what (so often) amounts to a message board?

nwatson 17y ago
In my ideal world a software (or any other) team would agree that any decision, spec, design, procedure, etc., would all live in a wiki (e.g. download and install http://twiki.org http://twiki.org). It's structured but very flexible. The team would use IM, e-mail, etc. to discuss these things, but anything of substance would be kept in the wiki. The wiki would be interlinked with a source code repository (e.g. subversion), a bug-tracking system, and a large file-share (the share is only for storing common data sets, DVD/CD images, documentation, 3rd party source, large data files/file-sets too large to store in bug-tracking, support info, etc. ... BUT NOT DESIGN OR OTHER DOCS, except maybe snapshots of Perl-pod or doxygen or javadoc or other auto-generated documentation from source code). Everyone would only work on stuff in that federated system ... no critical docs floating around in e-mail or file shares -- everything's in the Wiki. One would structure Wiki to track these things: * dev teams & their to-do lists & related stuff & diaries * research into systems with which software being developed must integrate * software procedures (how to build, continuously integrate, etc.) ... any new team member should be able to consult this and know how to build, test, and deploy the product * products and product lines * releases * fun stuff, links to online videos, restaurant reviews, pictures from Friday afternoon margarita fest, etc. I look forward to Google-Wave maturing ... they'll take the wiki concept to the next level.

by crux 17y ago

nwatson 17y ago

In my ideal world a software (or any other) team would agree that any decision, spec, design, procedure, etc., would all live in a wiki (e.g. download and install http://twiki.org http://twiki.org). It's structured but very flexible. The team would use IM, e-mail, etc. to discuss these things, but anything of substance would be kept in the wiki. The wiki would be interlinked with a source code repository (e.g. subversion), a bug-tracking system, and a large file-share (the share is only for storing common data sets, DVD/CD images, documentation, 3rd party source, large data files/file-sets too large to store in bug-tracking, support info, etc. ... BUT NOT DESIGN OR OTHER DOCS, except maybe snapshots of Perl-pod or doxygen or javadoc or other auto-generated documentation from source code). Everyone would only work on stuff in that federated system ... no critical docs floating around in e-mail or file shares -- everything's in the Wiki. One would structure Wiki to track these things: * dev teams & their to-do lists & related stuff & diaries * research into systems with which software being developed must integrate * software procedures (how to build, continuously integrate, etc.) ... any new team member should be able to consult this and know how to build, test, and deploy the product * products and product lines * releases * fun stuff, links to online videos, restaurant reviews, pictures from Friday afternoon margarita fest, etc. I look forward to Google-Wave maturing ... they'll take the wiki concept to the next level.