[stellation-res] An odd proposal

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

While hacking away on the current release, I've been thinking about 
future directions, and how to pursue some of the long term goals of
Stellation, particularly in the area of collaboration.

One thing that I've become interested in is the use of MUD/MOO
environments as collaborative spaces. It's definitely an odd
idea, but MOOs have been successfully used as collaboration
environments for distributing authoring of texts. 

For those who aren't familiar, a bit of background:

MUDs and MOOs started out as programmable environments for playing a
kind of on-line role-playing game. If you're old enough, you might 
remember Adventure or Zork: the first MUD was an attempt to create a
multiplayer version of Zork. Since they expected lots of people, any
fixed plot or fixed set of puzzles couldn't be expected to be enough to
keep the game going. So they made it possible to write your own stuff
and add it to the game. MOOs are a sort of second-generation MUD that
make things easier to program by adding a sort of object-orientation.

So it's a space full of objects where there are three kinds of objects:
characters (or avatars) which represent people interacting in the space;
locations which are objects that can hold other objects; and simple
objects. As a player in the space, you can create new locations and
objects, or you can interact with the existing objects through the
behaviors that they define.

I started looking at MOOs because I run on on-line play-by-email 
role playing game, and the site that hosts me is using a MOO for some
collaborative document writing for new games. I volunteered to help out
with the programming. The MOO that they're using is called enCore
(derived from the original LambdaMOO system), and it was designed for
education use in collaborative writing.

Using it, it struck me just how interesting these things were as
interfaces to collaborative spaces. The basic ideas of locations
where you perform particular activities, and objects with behaviors
that define how you interact with them is very natural; and the whole
thing is programmable enough to let you define your own locations,
behaviors, and processes. 

I'm interested in the notion of looking at a MOO-like environment as a
possible basis for how to implement some of the future collaborative
function of Stellation. I realize this is a wacky idea. But there might
be something to it. For example: locks can be treated as notices posted
on a bulletin board in a common room. Subprojects have annexes off of
the main room. To break a lock, you add a note to the notice about the
lock on the bulletin board. Since it's programmable, you can place
requirements on what someone has to do to modify the lock notice.

My proposal is this: if people are willing, and their network access
permits, I'd like to set up an enCore server on my personal server at
home. Once it's set up, I'd like to try using it for writing the design
docs for the parts of the fine-grained and collaborative support work
that we'll be starting once we get past a solid, stable release of
the core. The intention is not to force anyone to use it; but to allow
anyone who wants to join me in exploring how this kind of thing works
for technical collaboration.

enCore is accessed through a web-browser, but it uses port 7000. The
environment requires a web-browser with both Java and Javascript. I'm
not sure, but it *might* also be making a connection through port 7777.
(I'm still experimenting with the server, so I'm not sure of exactly
what's going on where... *Something* is talking to the MOO server
through 7777, but I haven't had the time to poke around and see if
that's happening in the server, or if it's being done by the Java
applet that gets downloaded by the client.)

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx  ------- Personal Email: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx