Possible new direction for yarrr

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

I think we have lost the original interesting aspects of yarrr in the
current wiki implementation. By this I mean the idea of creating a new
way to collaborate and create content. The current implemenation is
little more than a wiki editor with chat thrown in in a very badly
integrated way. Furthermore, there are real problems with finishing
off the wiki integration of live sections in a good way.

So, IMHO we could either drop yarrr, back up a bit and redo things, or
try to save the pretty cool stuff we've actually managed to create
while working on yarrr.

This is an approach to save the work we've done, while creating a
system that I think will be highly useful, although not revolutionary
in any way.

Yarrr - The meeting system

Yarrr is a system for handling interactive text based meetings on the
internet. Its target is one-off or recurring meetings with some
specific goal. The main communication is via a group-chat, with
additional possibilities to describe what you're talking about by
either whiteboard scribbling, text scribbling (live editing), image
upload and file upload.

The main strengths of a web-based text meeting tool are:
* Availibility
 Everyone who has a webbrowser can join. No local installation
 needed, no problems with firewalls.
* Scalability
 Text meetings scale a lot better wrt the amount of meeting members
 than phone/video meetings.  
* Archiving
 Its very easy to automatically generate archives of meetings, and
 the archives are searchable and easier and faster to read than
 e.g. a recording of a phone meeting.
* Its not much work
 Its mostly a question of rearranging and renaming a few things in the
 current code, changing the ui around a bit and adding a few small
 missing features.

Live text editing can be used to do things like keep track of action
points, just a way to dump out a backtrace, or a quick way to
collaboratively hack up a snippet of code. Much like the comments
where used in the Gtk+ meetings with the old yarrr version.

Here are some mockups of how this could look:


Go to http://meeting.gnome.org/GtkDevel:

----------------------------------------
Username:
Password:
[Log in] [Create user]
----------------------------------------

when logged in:

----------------------------------------
There is no active meeting in GtkDevel.
[Start new meeting]

Old meetings:

* _#3 24/4 2005, 12 people, 2h 12min_
* _#2 14/4 2005, 8 people, 1h 10min_
* _#1 4/4 2005, 13 people, 30min_
----------------------------------------

click start:

----------------------------------------
There is no active meeting in GtkDevel.

Meeting #4 is underway, 12 people in.
[Join meeting]

Old meetings:

* _#3 24/4 2005, 12 people, 2h 12min_
* _#2 14/4 2005, 8 people, 1h 10min_
* _#1 4/4 2005, 13 people, 30min_
----------------------------------------

Click join to enter the meeting. Both the main meeting screen and the
active meeting can be password protected to allow fully private
meetings or private meetings with public archives. You can also
schedule meetings one-off or recurring, if you set things up so that
not anyone can start a meeting. 


While in active meeting:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| meeting.gnome.org                      GtkDevel meeting #4, 30/5 2005  |
+--------------------------------------------------------+---------------+
|                                                        | alex          |
|                                                        | jrb           |
|                                                        | owen          |
|                                                        | hp (away)     |
|                                                        | walters (food)|
|                                                        |               |
|                                                        |               |
|                                                        |               |
|                                                        |               |
|                                                        |               |
| alex - this is teh rock                                |               |
| jrb - yeah, it is so sweet                             |               |
| owen - not very impressive...                          |               |
+--------------------------------------------------------+---------------+
|> type in text here...                                                  |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| [text][scribble][upload file][change state][stop meeting]              |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+---+
+  +---------+                                                       | ^ |
+  | white   |                                                       |###|
+  | board   |                                                       |###|
+  | mini    |                                                       |###|
+  +---------+                                                       |###|
+  [edit] [done] [to chat], edited by jrb, alex                      |###|
+                                                                    |   |
+  +------------------------------------------+                      |   |
+  |  live edit text scratchpad               |                      |   |
+  |                                          |                      |   |
+  |                                          |                      |   |
+  |                                          |                      |   |
+  +------------------------------------------+                      |   |
+  [done] edited by jrb, alex                                        |   |
+                                                                    |   |
+  # foobar.tar.gz - 26.3Kb                                          |   |
+  [done] uploaded by jrb                                            |   |
+                                                                    |   |
+  +-------------+                                                   |   |
+  | image       |                                                   |   |
+  | thumbnail   |                                                   |   |
+  +-------------+                                                   |   |
+  [done] [to chat], uploaded by alex                                |   |
+                                                                    |   |
+                                                                    |   |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+   |
+  Archived items:                                                   |   |
+                                                                    |   |
+  .... similar to above, but not editable ...                       |   |
+                                                                    | v |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+---+

Notes:

Clicking change state lets you just type in a new string that is shown
in the users list (so people don't have to /nick alex_away).

Uploaded images are shown in-line with the posibility to scribble on
them.

Images, whiteboards and files are just mixed in order of creation from
bottom up. (i.e. most recent at top.) When you "close" them they get
moved to the bottom for archiving and viewing (also most recent at
top). On meeting end all open items are closed.

There might be an ACL on who can stop the meeting. Also, the meeting
might stop after a timeout after the last persone leaves.



Opinions?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a Nobel prize-winning voodoo filmmaker who hides his scarred face behind 
a mask. She's a mentally unstable hypochondriac doctor who don't take no shit 
from nobody. They fight crime!