Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016/T112984

T112984 - This is the session pad for the Real Time Collaboration session, slated to begin at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, January 5th.

Purpose

We have the backend infrastructure mostly in place for real time collaborative editing. But actually rolling out collaborative editing requires more than just the Visual Editor team. It will require a coordinated effort to re-imagine what editing is like. We will need mechanisms to create user groups, real time chat mechanisms, mechanisms to temporarily persist collaborative sessions, perhaps even new core mechanisms for describing revisions (at the very least, revisions can have multiple authors!). We also need to think about social mechanisms and preventing harassment and vandalism of collaborative sessions. Pau has given us a starting point we can discuss, but we need to achieve broad consensus on the overall direction, refine the details, and figure out how to get there from here, with a unified roadmap across design, services, and editing.

Agenda

20 minutes - introductory presentation (recap of previous design work)
- https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qw8uzsVpYgmd3qyBBWup_t1UFrLQlkpDHMwEES40wtQ/edit?usp=sharing
45 minutes - open discussion
10 minutes - wrap up

Minutes

Etherpad

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikiDev16-T112984

Goals

Agree on a concrete "next step", whether that is a UX experiment or a backend implementation task (support for temporary storage of in-process edits, for example).
Discuss community implications, and develop a plan for managing harassment/abuse/etc in a real-time collaborative environment.
Agree on broad-stroke integration of collaborative UX into our current mediawiki skin. The existing design prototypes have been built against Winter, and we need to figure out how the pieces can be built on top of the skin we actually use (or a new standalone prototype needs to be built).

Chronology

This section is where an attempt is made to capture the gist of who said what, in what order. A transcript isn't necessary, but it's useful to capture the important points made by speakers as they happen.

Session guidelines

This checklist exists to help each session at WikiDev meet the following goals:

Have productive discussion about topics that need face-to-face time

Make progress towards agreement on a solution

Document what was discussed, including areas of agreement and disagreement

Create written list of action items for follow up

Update or create Phabricator tasks as appropriate

Specific tasks:

Assign meeting roles:
Facilitator

Gatekeeper

Scribe

Timekeeper

Facilitator: run session to achieve specific goals.
State or build consensus towards meeting goal and style, referencing one of these meeting types:
Problem-solving: surveying many possible solutions

Strawman: exploring one specific solution

Field narrowing: narrowing down choices of solution

Consensus: coming to agreement on one solution

Education: teaching people about an agreed solution

Identify agenda items and guide discussion to stay on topic

Redirect participants who begin venting or discussing things that can be done online

Scribe(s): Document the session
Copy https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikiDev16-YourSession to https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikiDev16-[SESSION NAME]

Fill out the information in the template, including
Link to Phabricator task describing session

Goal as described by facilitator

Topics of discussion as laid out by facilitator

Action items and who is responsible for them

Create new Phabricator tasks as needed

At end of session, copy meeting notes into Phabricator as appropriate

Gatekeeper: Actively manage participation
Interrupt people if they are dominating the discussion

Help people who are having difficulty being heard

If the gatekeeper is talking too much, someone else should interrupt them

Timekeeper: Keep track of time left and point out time passing to facilitator
If possible, estimate time for each topic written by scribes

Let people know when a topic has gone over its time

Give a warning when 5-10 minutes are left