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Social Software

Hydra, Biological Computing and Eric†Bonabeau

Right. I’m going to keep amending this post as I think of things to say and get other things done. I’m in the middle of a talk with Tim O’Reilly at the moment (how cool is my life), but I reckon I can concentrate on two things at once and talk a little bit about the last presentation I was at (Eric Bonabeau on Biological Computing). Or in fact – rather than talk about Eric Bonabeau’s talk, I’m going to talk a little about playing with Hydra and how around ten separate geeks collaborated to try and annotate and comment upon a discussion in real time… But first things first – the incredibly messy (and extremely entertaining to write) set of notes on the talk in question:

Right. What you can’t see on this document is which pieces were written by which people – and that’s a terrible shame because all that extra information that could be of use just vanishes when you save it to a disk. More to the point, it makes it really hard to demonstrate when it’s worked really well and when it’s fallen apart. So in this particular case I’ve done a set of screen-caps to illustrate what’s been going on:

More later (hopefully) on the experience of writing (messily and collaboratively) with Hydra. Addendum: Here’s a screen-cap of the participants all colour-coded as of the end of the eventhydra_tray.gif