-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 I was chatting with Henning today and thinking about how we might have better integration of our various communications media. The Inspire collaboration was enamored of Google Wave for a while, but it's going away at the end of the year. While we could put up our own wave server, I'm still unconvinced it's the right thing. The main advantage it seemed to have over separate wikis, mailing lists, etc. is that it brought everything together in one place, and it supported simultaneous editing.
Simultaneous editing is something that several people have built over the years and there are a number of examples. Also I'm not that interested in it. Bridging the gap between tools is much harder though. What you really want are distinct tools, so that programs can manage well the data that they're built to manage. But to be really useful, it's a hard requirement that all of these distinct tools be searchable from a single place. Further, their usefulness grows as additional convenience features are added. For example, I'm writing email which is going to go to a bunch of individuals' mailboxes and also to a mailing list software, which will archive it to the web. If I include a Wiki keyword, such as GitWorkflow, wouldn't it be nice if it were a clickable link for users of HTML email? And wouldn't it be nice if that word were clickable in the email archives? I've worked places there these problems were solved by separately patching each piece of infrastructure to work with all the others. This, as I'm sure you can imagine, is difficult and time consuming. But it is possible. RT, Postfix, mod_wiki, and IRC log bots can all be made to talk to each other within a few weeks, and the value in it is high. But it does take resources, and knowledge of the internals of many different things, and anyway, Inspire uses a lot of Invenio information infrastructure, and Invenio uses CERNs enterprise services, without (apparently) a lot of freedom to muck about with the internals of core infrastructure. So this brings me to my crazy idea. What if one were to modify the Trac Discussions plugin (http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/DiscussionPlugin) so that it would precisely mirror a mailing list? This would give you searchability of tickets, TracWiki, and mailing list traffic all in one place. And in Trac, it would be easy to create additional plugins to, for example, autoheat WikiWords or inline images referenced in discussions. Also noteworthy is email2trac (https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/email2trac), which could allow such a scheme to include the kind of customer management functionality that the Inspire collaboration currently uses RT for. I haven't looked at Trac's internals or messed with the Discussion Plugin much. At this point I'm pretty much blue-skying. But it seems like a sufficiently useful thing that I could imagine some subset of the Invenio community thinking it was a worthwhile thing to build, so I thought I'd put it out there and see what people think. Joe -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iQIcBAEBCAAGBQJMXCawAAoJEGh+D3e/PaCrPwsP/1vSEJ6PT9gseNUCrLWTGx2o MeE12o6Xq/f8RAiqY5Wg4v+PYBVZYTt29s5QtF0New99i3m/Zj++SWFGC2ioP3P5 kt6tqXIBSLduvEHFSgfM7vLgeGrROnnQcCappcF6EfBYxv2rlLhwsueA5CRq4u/m otM6kFMxjo7n+JyJdLyR8f1nql6YGA2ScUZ9UDdJrfPErtaqype6sGbEszBgcWp3 MYnoThfIuqKu3pZ/+sFIZCODZwOcVlpbolje8YxZqAqoLnDT3L0bsvFf7EihchE3 j7UEf5PFBbNZ29wT1hVmVcTaMX3NEJUWfSvkINhnbvIXnIXy+jYDsvscfSeeC/tD /FXaH3V7BID2g+GBQjQMgeN6RJL4GZUnRPS/Qe4Kdl1+ImmO67sZSvHWwS4W1HON hiW5p0XGjl5CA8GagQgFyymw7OBgdaeSmBwLIG8hf4PPDjIWw3aFu7QhCvDxFRrG 39HP/hWpWHKLWc599a+ewk+UWclzA9CPhsQg78WtRlYVo3adJSgWJ7LZiJOjmnlC b+HfvgHYOM2SSi14QQpExAcnoQ3o6b5+xL6mQ2kdUixgNE5ppmqFW1oINi1b9kXx +C7Aor2gv9KFED3qhFVxVvfkvyyO74jy/dpMF/gQB2/iIjpNwea1TPh4Y57lBTpI 4akRgmeQ7tJwS8+dbz39 =Cfgy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
