Loomio

Using EtherPad in place of the Context Box

DS Danyl Strype Public Seen by 133

In the Pirates group we often find ourselves using a PiratePad (implementation of EtherPad run by the German Pirates) instead of the Context Box, for drafting documents. There are a number of benefits to this over using the Context Box including:
* realtime editing by multiple users
* colour-coded tracking of what has been changed by who
* timeline functions which makes it super-easy to navigate through various versions in the history and see what has changed

The downside of this is that at times people put material into the Pad that really ought to be a comment in the Loomio discussion (or both), so you end up with two diverging discussions, and because the contents of the Pad is not on the same page (literally and figuratively) as the Loomio discussion, people can end up talking at cross-purposes because one person hasn't read what the other one has been adding to the Pad. Another downside is that the Pad doesn't know about the privacy settings, or group membership, of the discussion it is attached to.

I imagine it would be a lot of work to reimplement EtherPad functionality within Loomio. But would it be possible to run an Etherpad server in parallel with a Loomio server, and have the pad appear where the Context Box currently appears? Is it possible to make it only visible to users with read access to that group, and only editable by those with write access? It is possible to set it up so that whenever a new discussion is created in the Loomio group, a new pad is also created to be associated with it as just described?

I guess this would be done through a plug-ins architecture? The Context Box would still be the default feature, but if Loomio hosts decided to run an Etherpad, and install the plug-in, the behaviour described above would replace the Context Box on that instance.

F

fauno Mon 10 Aug 2015 6:37PM

etherpad-lite can be embedded and contents consumed via api (there're several non-functioning plugins for mediawiki...), no idea about piratepad.

at consenso pirata we were planning on adding etherpad-lite support too, since we also use it a lot, but not as a context box but as a working place.

the easiest way to do it would be to add a link button to a pad url with the same discussion id, so you can go back and forth and it's easy to guess to which discussion a pad belongs.

we also discussed detecting changes and showing them as events on the comment+vote stream, but that's clearly more work :)

RG

Robert Guthrie Mon 10 Aug 2015 9:35PM

Sounds super exciting. I'd love to see Loomio Etherpad integrations.

F

fauno Fri 14 Aug 2015 5:51AM

we have something working, it's basically a button on the context box that links to a configurable etherpad url and shares the discussion key :P

https://github.com/loomio/loomio/compare/master...piratas-ar:etherpad

JR

Jon Richter Sat 31 Oct 2015 1:49PM

Please also be aware of http://prosemirror.net/.

DS

Danyl Strype Tue 3 Nov 2015 9:55AM

Thanks @jonrichter . Would this be something that could be incorporated into the Loomio Context Box to allow for realtime editing and the other missing functionality I mentioned in the discussion starter?

JR

Jon Richter Sat 7 Nov 2015 1:37AM

Yes. Just to get an idea.

JG

Jacob Gadikian Sun 8 Nov 2015 10:08AM

I proposed something like this almost a year ago maybe more. I am all for it. Collaborative editing allows for incredible consensus building.

GC

Greg Cassel Sun 8 Nov 2015 7:25PM

Collaborative editing allows for incredible consensus building.

Agreed, but it can turn into a total mess if more than a small group of relatively 'like-minded' people have editing permissions at the same time. It can become competitive, and the loudest and most persistent voices may outcompete the possible emergence of collective intelligence.

(Collaborative authorship tools can and will evolve further.)

DS

Danyl Strype Mon 9 Nov 2015 1:25AM

This is an important caveat @gregorycassel, but in the context of a Loomio group, none of the features work (comments, proposals etc) if the group isn't at least trying to be somewhat like-minded. I think a more collaborative use of Context Boxen would be an improvement on both the tendency to leave the original discussion starter to go stale as the discussion moves on, and the use of external tools (whether EtherPad, GoogleDocs or something else) as discussed in the OP.

JG

Jacob Gadikian Mon 9 Nov 2015 5:25AM

Any way we can leverage apache wave concepts? I am just tossing out ideas re: evolution of collaborative editing tools-- there are enough out there that we must be able to find a suitor, I think.

Jacob GadikianE-mail: [email protected] ( [email protected] )
SKYPE: faddat
Phone/SMS: +84 167 789 6421

Load More