Simon Willison's Weblog: collaboration

Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments

2023-11-30T21:59:54+00:00

Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments

New plugin for Datasette and Datasette Cloud: datasette-comments, providing tools for collaborating on data exploration with a team through posting comments on individual rows of data.

Alex Garcia built this for Datasette Cloud but as with almost all of our work there it’s also available as an open source Python package.

Tags: collaboration, projects, datasette, datasette-cloud, alex-garcia

I was wrong. CRDTs are the future

2020-09-28T21:03:57+00:00

I was wrong. CRDTs are the future

Joseph Gentle has been working on collaborative editors since being a developer on Google Wave back in 2010, later building ShareJS. He’s used Operational Transforms throughout, due to their performance and memory benefits over CRDTs (Conflict-free replicated data types)—but the latest work in that space from Martin Kleppmann and other researchers has seen him finally switch allegiance to these newer algorithms. As a long-time fan of collaborative editing (ever since the Hydra/SubEthaEdit days) I thoroughly enjoyed this as an update on how things have evolved over the past decade.

Via Hacker News

Tags: algorithms, collaboration, crdt, martin-kleppmann

Quoting Eric Dobbs

2020-02-13T18:48:41+00:00

A group of software engineers gathered around a whiteboard are a joint cognitive system. The scrawls on the board are spatial cues for building a shared model of a complex system.

— Eric Dobbs

Tags: collaboration

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency

2018-12-02T19:40:33+00:00

Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency

This is smart: the "golden path" approach to encouraging a standard stack within a large engineering organization. If you build using the components on the golden path you get guaranteed ongoing support and as much free monitoring/tooling as can possibly be provided. I also really like the suggestion that this should be managed by a "council" of senior engineers with one member of the council rotated out every quarter to keep things from getting stale and cabal-like.

Charity Majors describes the process like this:

Assemble a small council of trusted senior engineers.

Task them with creating a recommended list of default components for developers to use when building out new services. This will be your Golden Path, the path of convergence (and the path of least resistance).

Tell all your engineers that going forward, the Golden Path will be fully supported by the org. Upgrades, patches, security fixes; backups, monitoring, build pipeline; deploy tooling, artifact versioning, development environment, even tier 1 on call support. Pave the path with gold. Nobody HAS to use these components ... but if they don't, they're on their own. They will have to support it themselves. [...]

Via Charity Majors

Tags: collaboration, software-engineering, charity-majors

Looking for a modern day wiki for a group project

2017-04-11T07:12:00+00:00

My answer to Looking for a modern day wiki for a group project on Ask MetaFilter

GitHub offers a wiki for each repository. It's free for public projects (no need to upload any code, just create a repo and ignore the other tabs) of you can pay $7 monthly for private ones.

With public wikis you can still control which users are allowed to make edits.

https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-wikis/

The only missing feature in your list is WYSIWYG editing, but they do offer a good "preview" tab.

Tags: ask-metafilter, collaboration, wiki, resolved

Quoting Neil Fraser

2009-08-14T10:38:57+00:00

Last night I woke up at 2am and realized that there was a fundamental problem with cursor preservation in today’s real-time collaborative applications [...] MobWrite now has what I believe to be the most advanced cursor preservation algorithm available.

— Neil Fraser

Tags: collaboration, mobwrite, neil-fraser, realtime

google-mobwrite

2009-01-24T23:55:18+00:00

google-mobwrite

Neil Fraser’s terrifyingly clever differential synchronization algorithm (for SubEthaEdit-style collaboration over the web) is now available as an open source Python and JavaScript library.

Tags: collaboration, google, javascript, mobwrite, neil-fraser, open-source, python, subethaedit

Google apps for your newsroom

2008-01-07T21:24:05+00:00

Google apps for your newsroom

How the LJ World team use online tools like Google Spreadsheet, Swivel, ManyEyes and Google MyMaps to collaborate with the newsroom and build data-heavy applications even faster.

Tags: collaboration, data-journalism, django, google, google-calendar, google-docs, google-maps, journalism, ljworld, manyeyes, matt-croydon, mymaps, news, newsroom

Chat rooms and meetings

2003-01-11T17:28:52+00:00

In-Room Chat as a Social Tool: Clay Shirky describes an experiment with an online chat room set up to accompany a meeting of 30 people taking place in the same room. The chat room (available to attendees via Wifi laptops and displayed on a big screen at the front of the room) had some interesting effects on the dynamics of the meeting, not least of which was the dramatic impact the chat room had on the "interrupt logic" of the proceedings.

Tags: clay-shirky, collaboration