Multiple Simultaneous Editing

From: steppenvalve (steppenvalve_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 05/31/04 

Date: 30 May 2004 18:52:09 -0700

I'd like to know if there is a way to edit a document the way a
physical document can be edited by a group of people.

Example: Suppose a group of people is sitting around a table looking
at a single copy of a document and one says, "What if we do this
instead?", and changes part of the document. Someone sitting across
the table turns the document around so she can see it right-side-up
and says, "We'll need to change this for that to work", and makes
another change on the same piece of paper. A third person could take
out something else, add a step to a procedure, or whatever, all on the
same *** of paper.

This isn't posible with standard computer files where only one
terminal has write-access and the rest are read-only. The posibility
for abuse is, of course, magnified over a network, where a person's
gall is directly proportional to their anonymity and distance from
others, but that's not the programer's problem.

The closest things we have to group authorship is newsgroups and
chatrooms. These allow people to voice their thoughts on the same
screen, with limited ability to edit their own voicings (in
newsgroups: delete post), and some ability to ignore (chat) or
killfile (NG) other's. Multiple editting would have to have a seperate
link similar to this so people can discuss changes. This could be a
voice link or chat-style text link. Perhaps "write-only" access could
be passed from one terminal to another by a moderator. This feature
may be an entirely different software package written by programers
with a different philosophy.

MSE as I've described it doesn't seem to be available yet. Is anyone
working in this direction?

PL&HB
Valve

P.S. Perhaps a better acronym is MESS (multiple editing,
simultaneously syncronized). If you can think of a better one, use it.

Quantcast