Mini-Conference Proposal: Frameworks for Collaboration

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

C. Scott Ananian wrote:
| On Sat, Mar 29, 2008 at 1:47 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
| <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
|>  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.
|
| Hmm.  I've always thought of a high-level framework here as based on a
| shared undo/redo list, since most mature applications support
| undo/redo.  The idea is that we provide the necessary distributed
| consensus algorithms to allow all participants to agree on the order
| of the entries in their undo/redo list; anyone who had actions applied
| in the wrong order performs undos, then redos to adjust their order.
| When you present your proposal, I'd love to hear a comparison to this
| approach.

That is a very interesting perspective.  I will definitely think hard
about that and try to come up with a sensible comparison.

Offhand, I think the Collisionless idea is like a design where each
person's Undo/Redo list can be in a different order, and yet always reach
the same final state, as long as they contain the same total set of edits.

--Ben