• Launchpad Entry: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/foo

• Created: 2006-05-06 by KrishnaSankar

• Contributors: KrishnaSankar

• Packages affected:

Summary

• Implement in phases
• Simplicity and easy to use are our goals

• First phase - MoinMoin Desktop with "Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu" themed artwork (home page, a set of common templates and menu) as part of Ubuntu

• Subsequent phases - sharing, permission and user accounts, social networking and tagging interface et al

Rationale

• We should lead in the use of computers above and beyond normal uses like word processing and music. IMHO, collaboration is one of the next frontiers. But it has to be easy to understand and use. Another dimension is the leverage of peer-to-peer concepts to aid collaboration for day-to-day activities - various aspects of life whether it is study, research, play or traditional work. This can be a great use case for the $100 laptop (olpc - One Laptop per Child), as it has limited storage capability and server abilities. This could even be a mechanism for distributed storage ! Wiki is an excellent collaboration tool. It would be a good idea to add this as a feature in the Edgy Eft release. The plan is not only to add the basic Wiki capability but also the ability to collaborate using Wiki over a P2P model, in a hastily formed network !

  For example, if one could publish selected Wiki items in a ZeroConf substrate, others who connect can add to it, refer to it and collaborate - be they working on a shopping list at home or collaborating on a community project or planning a family event or working on a school project ! This will work if we have a P2P Wiki as a part of Ubuntu !

  The allure is the intersection of the Wiki-way, the composable network primitives (wireless/wired) and ZeroConf capabilities ... Also, as described in the book "Linked", this specification touches the fringes of normadic computing, focussing on small groups and individuals (as opposed to bigger groups in corporate setting) and the need for collaboration on their activities. Another example could be, one downloads the pertinent details from a museum Wiki, annotate it while visiting the museum and then uploads the annotations ! The best of both worlds - connected and disconnected ! We will need to embed primitives and mechanisms for metadata, intelligent contextual tags as well as social tagging. In the future, we could add enhanced features like seamless integration with hosted Wikis, cultural ontology based taxonomies (this is better than the Google-model of one dimensional keyword based search) et al.

  Naturally we will implement the features in a phased manner. Our initial focus should be the lowest common denominator - olpc, home user, children, school projects and teaching ... very simple, easy to use, intuitive yet powerful based on emerging behaviour ... Some of the "features" contributing to simplification :

• Plan to have a one page user manual - two sections concepts and tasks
• No state will be kept - for example don't care who created it or who modified an entry. This assumption is used in many other Wikis
• Will keep revisions
• No management UI. All tasks off of one tool bar
• No save - automatically saved on entry !

• Shared - what is published via ZeroConf.

• The publish mechanism could be Atom.

Use cases

1. Home Use - shopping list
2. School Use - working on a group project
3. Children working together on a story or group project. I think we can get a few more use cases from the olpc project
4. Corporate use - ad-hoc groups from different companies working on a project (It is almost impossible to do it now) This use case has to also show robust security; we might not want to support this in the beginning, but this can be a good motivator
5. Public collaborative Wikis - for example art or museum or concert ... (This needs to be thought thru due to security concerns)

Scope

• Will start out small - Basic Desktop Wiki substrate as part of Ubuntu with a good interface (templates with "Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu" themes) and a simple information model (see below)
• Next we will add publish capability
  • P2P feature set
    • Editing, publishing and sync (P2P sync as well as central server sync)

    • Publish capability over ZeroConf

• Then we will add the social tagging & metadata capability

• We will have to add "Gobby-like" feature
• Security/visibility will be an issue as soon as we start the publish feature
• We might add SIP-Presence features and integration with IM (later, depending on what users want)
• An item definitely worth considering is providing a user acount and some Wiki space for all users. Launchpad account to every user ?

Design

Information Model

Six pieces of information

1. Title
2. Stuff
3. Private/Public (combo box)
4. Category (Combo box)
5. Space
6. Comments
7. Tags

User level features

Lists of all kinds

• To be created as easy to use "Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu" themed template

• Grocery List
• Notes on things
• While you were out note for message board

• Review Note & social tags

• Idea notes
• Teaching stuff

• ToDo

• Project specific
• Meeting notes
• Discussion notes
• Usable by children !
• Will have simple templates for all these types of lists
• People can create new templates and publish them !

Menu

• New Stuff [Icon - a shining object]
• Tag [Icon - yellow tag or luggage tag]

• SpellCheck [Icon - Dictionary]

• Comment [Icon - Watercooler with people around]
• Revision [Icon - a sun dial]
• Grid View [Icon - a grid]
• Search
• Search All
• Connect [Icon - arrows like a router symbol]
• Publish As Blog [Icon - stand on a podium]
• Publish [Icon - ubuntu icon or similar showing people working toogether]
• Link [Icon - a connection icon]
  • Note : Link/Attach will disappear on next reboot or logout. (Makes security easier and transparent)
• Backup [Icon - spare tire in a car]

Implementation

• This will be a multi-phased implementation

• Phase 1 : Basic "Wiki-buntu" (with usability and art work)

  • Desktop MoinMoin as part of Ubuntu

  • Default Homepage "Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu" feel
  • Simple Wiki Menu interface
  • 5 to 6 easy to use templates with "Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Edubuntu" themes

     We want to make sure there is a critical mass of easy to use features plus the templates. So Edgy+1 is fine.

• Phase 2 : Basic Ability to share + Ui improvement

  • Someway to make it sharable and visible from local computers
  • Some form of permission mechanism - simple user account ? separate read and write access
  • WYSIWYG

• Phase 3 : Global sharing

• Phase 4 : Social Tagging

  • Interface to social networks - for example - The Bouillon project

Code

• Usability/UI - Ellen
• Artwork team - I am hoping to seek help from Frank Schoep on the art work/themed templates

• Coding and packaging - KrishnaSankar

• SebastianDröge has promised to help. (I will need LOTS of help!) Also we could leverage MoinMoin team thru Sebastian

• Got encouraging e-mail from AlexanderSchremmer who is working on a Google Summer Project on WikiSyncronisation. This also would be very helpful.

Data preservation and migration

None

Background information for now and future

BoF agenda and discussion

We discussed this project on June 22,2006. Discussion summary follows:

• What is important ?
  • Security ? Then we need login and account management features. Need some sort of ACLs as well. (We can make the ACLs transparent and easy to use)
    • Simple security
      • Who is allowed to edit ? current machine / local network users ?
      • Should be easy to give permission
      • create accounts ? e-mil alias ?
    • Publish mechanism should be easy and available everywhere
    • Publish to Ubuntu Wiki ?
  • Easy Installation ?
  • Easy mark-up ?
• Automatic Indexing and search
• Plug-in spell-check

• MoinMoin has a desktop edition (need to explore how easy it is to package and install)

• SHould we have opendoc format ? Easier to share than Wiki markup
• Channel concept ?
• Interface to Gobby

Parking lot (for notes, various questions - relevant and irrelevant)

Notes

• An interesting software for MAC http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

• Some discussions http://dotnot.org/blog/archives/2005/03/29/subethaedit-windows-version/

• Another collaborative editor which is also ZeroConf enabled Gobby

• Desktop MoinMoin, ZimWiki are all goo candidates

  Matt and Trent mentioned Tomboy. We can base this off of Tomboy. It has an excellent interface and the basic primitives. We will need to add the P2P Wiki capabilities, ZeroConf and templates. Tomboy is based on C#; i would have preferred C or Python. But this will not come in the way of adding a great feature to Ubuntu.

• Implementation

  • I am a fan of Python and was thinking of developing a Moinmoin-lite for this. During my putzing around LaunchPad, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was based on MoiMoin as well !

Questions

1. Is Atom hub-spoke or P2P or both ?
2. Copy - how do we handle conflicts ?
3. There will the concept of private and public space. One can only publish items in the public space. The private/public space would be an easy checkbox item (which can be toggled anytime) and also will have different colors, so that it is apparent which one is publishing.
   • Too complex ?
4. Symbolic links (?)
5. Template creation - separate ? Create template based on current ?
   • Template hierarchy ? Now It becomes too complex. So simple one level template, with Wiki-like codes
6. Publish and sync technology

   • ZeroConf based locator framework for publishing and subscribing topics

   • P2P based sync
   • Granular sync
   • Publish and sync semantics - based on zeroConf publishing

   • mateedit

   • KDE ZeroConf interview

Comments

[May 7,2006 - e-mail from Trent]If you want a network-interactive wiki, you might want to have a look at tomboy and see if you can base something off that. <KS> Yep, Tomboy is simple and has good search and spell check capabilities.</KS>

<SebastianDröge> You probably want to talk to the guy making the Networked Tomboy SoC project: http://live.gnome.org/Tomboy/NetworkedTomboy

<KS> Yep, good idea. Alex's ideas for SoC here http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2006/Ideas are similar to what we are looking for. Have sent an e-mail to ALex and see what he thinks.

Tomboy remainder looks good as well as an add-on - http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-Environment/Tools/Tomboy-Reminder-Plugin-9116.shtml

MikeMcway: could be underestimating Tomboy, but have you considered expanding another wiki program like Newton? (less like post-its and more like a local wiki/sharing of info tool) similarly good search and spell checking with an simple interface, although the switch between editor mode and navigation could be annoying http://newton.sourceforge.net/

<KS> yep, Newton looks good and might be easier. Only advantage of Tomboy is that it is a good notetaking tool as well and would be a good addition to Edgy. Let us discuss in detail today (June 22,2006 2:00-3:00 PM)

You may be interested in the Bouillon project at http://oc-co.org. In short, it is WYSIWYG P2P wiki with reputations deployed over Jabber network. Every page in such wiki is assembled from pieces your agent retrieves from your trusted social vicinity. This gives you nearly perfect openness and spam protection. It also has natural syncing, versioning etc -- VictorGrishchenko, 30 Jun

<KS> Yep, very good capabilities. My thought is for us to hook up to them via APIs and leverage their systems. July 02,06 </KS>

• Bouillon implementation/deployment options might be of some interest in this regard. -- VictorGrishchenko, 3 Jul

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