Why Hasn’t Software Solved Collaboration?

One of the three creators of Writely, the collaborative writing app that became Google Docs, posted this thoughtful piece about ways software still falls short.

Oh, nice:

Google Docs lets collaborators edit a single document, but that leaves the problem of organizing the conversation around that document. And this disconnection between conversations and documents turns out to help explain why it’s so hard to find good information about fast-moving topics like AI.

I believe this describes a quarter of Pete's lifetime quest, and ten percent of my conversations with him :)  (percentiles are estimates) It also describes the NeoBooks project nicely, though not completely.

Then:

In my experience, there's only one way for a collaborative project to remain organized. It requires one individual to dedicate themselves to keeping it that way. (the Project Hero)

​I'm not sure I agree with his generalization that the problem is that documents are logical and projects are temporal, but I do agree that docs are unruly project participants. He describes my issue with meeting notes well. I love well-structured notes, but find the resulting documents fall short of being useful.

My amateur answer is to harvest "nuggets" of text from the longer stream, give them their own homes (in my case, in separate Markdown files on Pete's Massive Wiki), and link them up with WikiLinks.

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