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July 21, 2003

hyki notes

It would be really interesting to use the hyki in a meeting. It's so very unstructured that repeated usage should quickly grow its own conventions - which I could imagine being packaged as "hyki templates", with for example a set of default pages for MeetingAgenda, MeetingAttendees, and so on.

The current version (all 5 hours' work...!) is rough, experimental, and unlikely to scale robustly. Basically it doesn't do "transaction distribution", it does "page distribution". In practice this means that (unlike Hydra and Groove text tool) page-level conflicts are resolved by "last edit wins", and that any simultaneous page edits are a conflict. Whereas, with a command-coordinating system, individual keystrokes or character-level edits could be applied independently on a page. With the "page distribution" model I'd need to get into performing HTML diff, and I really really don't want to go there.

But, again, I'm quite fascinated by the potential of a tool like this. Immediate enough to be useful face to face. Divergent enough to support an explorative, brainstorming group activity. Persistent and awareness-enabled enough to handle distributed groups too. If you want to take it for a spin together, drop me a note.