Hi all, I would distinguish two kinds of collaborative editing.
* interactive collaborative editing - 2 or more people working simultaneously on a document * non-interactive collaborative editing - only one person actually modifying the document at any one time BUT others always having live access to the latest version if required. I think typically you would spend 5% of writing time in the first mode but that implementing it solves nasty problems with collaborating in the second mode. More specifically: On 2010-09-24 17:41, "Richard Heck" <rgh...@comcast.net> wrote: > On 09/24/2010 11:43 AM, Les Denham wrote: >> On Friday 24 September 2010 10:29:10 Rob Oakes wrote: > I have to confess that I too am somewhat puzzled by this, but I can see > a use case that would be good for me. Say I've written a paper with a > collaborator. We are now at a pretty late stage in the process. It might > be useful to be able to read through the document together and make > changes we can both see "in real time". I'm not saying this really would > be all that great, but I can see using it. This is the kind of situation where actively using real time editing is really useful and for me it crops up whenever I am writing something with a colleague for another institution. It is incredibly motivating and leads to better writing if you can skype and write in an _interactive_ and collaborative fashion. There are potential low tech ways to do this using screen sharing, but they do lose the significant benefit of attaching edits. Furthermore since you don't usually want to have a permanent share of your desktop you can't leave them on the whole time and that for me is the problem - in my view the real benefit of a rich collaborative editing implementation is that allows much easier and more consistent - non-interactive collaborative editing. Non-interactive collaborative editing means that there can always be one live version of a document to which anyone can apply changes that are versioned, identified and much more likely. Essentially it solves the conflicting merge problem by automatically merging all the time so that you are always looking at the latest version (and can be alerted to recent changes). You can try and do this with traditional version control arrangements but you will always run into a conflict if the system isn't designed for the possibility of interactive collaborative editing. Does this seem reasonable to others? Or have other people found ways to solve the non-interactive collaborative writing situation when people end up modifying the same document. In my experience this happens often enough that it's a problem and existing software that I am aware of makes it too hard to solve for most researchers. Greg.
