#3310 NORM First D: Groups: when you are sharing an activity in a group, there is a chat for the group

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#3310: Groups: when you are sharing an activity in a group, there is a chat for
the group
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  Reporter:  kimquirk          |       Owner:  Eben                  
      Type:  task              |      Status:  new                   
  Priority:  normal            |   Milestone:  First Deployment, V1.0
 Component:  interface-design  |     Version:                        
Resolution:                    |    Keywords:                        
  Verified:  0                 |  
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Changes (by Eben):

 * cc: smcv (added)


Comment:

 Replying to [comment:2 smcv]:
 > Is this the same as having some sort of integrated one-chatroom-per-
 activity provided by the framework, or is this something else entirely?
 >
 > Presence Service provides a text channel (chat room) for each activity;
 this is needed for Tubes, but the idea was that this would also be used
 for some sort of overlay or sidebar chat implemented in the sugar.activity
 library. At the moment, the only activity which uses this text channel is
 Chat (everything else just ignores it), but it'd make many activities much
 more useful (I was trying out Web earlier today and thought it'd be much
 better with some sort of chat, for instance).

 This is a really big part of it...

 > On the other hand, if you want to have a chatroom per "group", where a
 "group" is some nebulous entity like "Class 3b" or "My friends", then we'd
 need to write quite a lot of code in Presence Service to support this.

 ...but considering the ways which we've been considering introducing it at
 the interaction level, it may make more sense if the chat is always around
 the "group" regardless of whether or not that group is a temporary one
 around an activity or not.

 > Would per-activity chat meet your requirements? If so, it should just
 require a UI for existing PS functionality to be designed and implemented,
 probably by adapting code from Chat; the current PS could probably be left
 untouched.

 Per activity chat would obviously be a huge leap forward, making
 collaborations around activities that much more meaningful.  Having
 persistent group chats would really amount to having something equivalent
 to an IRC channel for the group.  We should get a better idea of exactly
 how hard these two options are if that needs to inform the design
 decisions in the coming months.

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Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/3310#comment:3>
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