[sugar] Flatland: a place to collaborate

[Ka-Ping Yee]

Hi folks!

At a recent visit to OLPC it occurred to me that a freeform 2-D shared
space would be a useful thing to have on the XO laptops.  As I thought
about it more I realized that, with a rich enough set of tools, it
could enable many kinds of creativity and collaboration.

I've started writing up these ideas, with an eye particularly towards
incremental development, at:

    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Flatland

and I'd like to know what you think.  How do you like the idea, and
what would you add to make it even more fun and useful?

The Flatland idea as proposed uses the overlay in a somewhat different
way from the "bulletin board" design described in the OLPC guidelines.
How much of the bulletin board design has been worked out in detail at
this point?  On the one hand, I'm concerned that it may be confusing
for the overlay button to bring up a different bulletin board for
each zoom level and each activity, which is what motivated the proposal
in Flatland for a single overlay plane accessible from anywhere.  On
the other hand, I do see the value in having a shared space that belongs
to each activity.  Can we have a discussion about how the overlay plane
should work, and look for ways to integrate the approaches?


-- ?!ng