Mini-Conference Proposal: Frameworks for Collaboration

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

Title: Frameworks for simultaneous and sequential collaboration

Abstract:
The OLPC sharing design encompasses two rough classes of sharing.  In the
simultaneous case, a number of students join a shared Activity and all edit a
document together in real time.  In the sequential case, students make local
copies of a document, edit it by themselves, and then post the result for
others to continue editing.  Current implementations of simultaneous
collaboration have largely used ad-hoc messaging protocols over Telepathy. 
Sequential collaboration has not yet been implemented, but many have viewed it
from the perspective of Version Control Systems, with the accompanying branch
and merge metaphors.

We will have an open discussion of how to build a framework that will ease the
creation of reliable collaborative activities.  I will also outline a proposal
for "Collisionless", a particular message-based API that encompasses both
real-time and offline collaboration.  The key idea of Collisionless is to break
down high-level tasks into a sequence of messages whose significance does not
depend on the order in which they are received.