(2020-07-30) Martin Realtime Collaborative Systems

Jess Martin on Realtime Collaborative Systems. Why Realtime Collaboration?

I believe systems that allow humans to collaborate on work products in realtime are of critical importance in tackling the complexity inherent in the world of work. Furthermore, I believe realtime collaborative work to be one of the greatest joys in life

What about Asynchronous Collaboration?

Asynchronous collaboration systems are incredibly important! There are use cases for realtime collaboration and there are use cases for asynchronous collaboration.

From project management tools (systems like Kanban) to Git (distributed version control systems), humans have built some incredible systems for asynchronous collaboration and they've driven massive technological improvements.

What about Knowledge Representation?

A critical component of any collaboration system is the way knowledge is represented in that system

We have some domains with very advanced knowledge representations; source code and 3D models come to mind. We have other domains where knowledge representation that is still quite rudimentary

I would argue that knowledge representation is largely domain-specific and therefore will best be tackled "bottom up" by starting with a motivating problem.

Examples

the most powerful realtime collaboration systems of all time is that of human language

Conversely, the most powerful asynchronous collaboration systems is perhaps written language.

Gold standard: The Whiteboard
Pair programming
Figma
Google Docs
Trello (can be used this way)
Google Sheets
Phone Calls
Video
Teleconferencing
Chat

Digital versus Analog

By and large, current collaboration systems tend to be either purely analog or purely digital. Our digital tools often act as only a physical "window" into a digital space. This does a massive disservice to our bodies and the realization that our embodied nature.