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Saturday December 16, 2006

Just In Time Collaboration

Of course many of us knew that yesterday was the last day for the JavaOne 2007 Call for Papers. In fact I had submitted my "Performance Criteria for OpenJDK Contributions" talk proposal way back on Tuesday. I've been talking with several the folks in the Free Software and Open Source Java community about JavaOne including Mark Wielaard (mjw), Dalibor Topic (robilad), and Geir Magnusson, Jr (geir)-- but they've been busy this week at JavaPolis (I was not able to attend, but I understand it was quite a good conference).

I've been thinking and talking a fair amount about getting to community consensus around Java Policy for Linux (agreeing on details like the filesystem layout, packaging interdependencies, browser integration, developer guidelines, etc.) for some time. Dalibor suggested that we do a session on this topic and so I enlisted Geir and David Walluck (DavidW2) to join me to propose a "Java on Linux" talk. Ideally we would like to add some of the key packaging experts to this talk as well, such as nichoj, overholt, fitzsim, jvw, and doko. Whom am I missing? Anyone else care to join in?

What was remarkable yesterday wasn't that I was chatting with these guys and Tom Tromey (tromey) on IRC and IM, but that we actually went from the idea to having the proposal submitted in a couple hours. An essential element to this Just-In-Time success was Dalibor suggesting that we leverage Google Docs to work out the abstract -- together.

I use often use various Google services, but I'm a little hesitant to do so because of the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. Nevertheless I must say that that the experience using Google Docs was very impressive. I've often wanted to edit documents collaboratively and I've known about various hacks for doing this (e.g. OpenOffice through a shared VNC session), but here I found not only the ability for multiple people to edit the document at the same time, but also a handy way to visually review the document revision history (redlines colored by the user making modifications) and noticed the menu options to export to many formats (e.g. HTML, PDF, OpenOffice, etc.). Even though there are quirks (e.g. the invite-your-friend-to-edit e-mails are not RFC 822 compliant) the service is an excellent collaboration tool.



While we were chatting Geir proposed doing a panel at J1 to get everyone together and talk about "What cooperation can lead to and how to keep an environment that fosters collaboration, innovation and compatibility." In a matter of minutes I was editing the abstract with geir, mjw, tromey and robliad. Amazingly the basic ideas converged quickly and I submitted the talk to the CFP website (which, I am told, may continue to work until Monday ). If we are lucky the "Java Libre Panel" will get accepted and provide a lively debate next May!

I have never submitted talks to J1 in such a short span of time. While it is awkward to switch windows from IRC, to Gaim, to Firefox constantly (I need more pixels!) the result is clear: e-mail is a last resort for collaboration. It's not obvious that having a voice conference would have added much more efficacy to our work... especially considering that we were spread out among something like 9 different timezones and multi-tasking with other work and/or personal affairs.

Posted by tmarble ( Dec 16 2006, 09:54:16 AM CST ) Permalink