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
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
Why not just use an IM client that logs conversations in a text file either natively or via a plugin, with the contributors all in the same conversation? That way, you get the real-time contribution factor, with the added bonus of being able to see who said what. If you used Microsoft Messenger you'd also have a communal whiteboard for everybody to express ideas graphically too.
→ Posted by: Marcus at April 24, 2003 7:10 AM
It would seem the colors are difficult to pick out who said what - there are four variations of blue/purple and two greens. Perhaps it's merely the screenshot?
→ Posted by: rhapsodie at April 24, 2003 5:34 PM