Collaborative Creation

5. Apart Together, Script by Bob Blakley

Act Five, Notes from WAAA2007

Use Case

We want to help distributed groups of people work together to create authoritative commentary on legislation, as well as creating other types of documents. To facilitate this distributed effort, we need mechanisms to validate and categorize statements and the reputation and authority of the creator of those statements.

Both the document being created, and external documents relevant to it (such as legislation that is the target of commentary), are constantly changing. There is also an ever-changing constellation of issues to be resolved. We need mechanisms to track these changes and issues.

Capabilities

(what actions the user of the system will perform)

• Create a document where it can be seen publicly
• Associate a document with another entry in the database (e.g. legislation).
• Edit your document, and provide edit-permission to other logins
• Visualize changes in the document, and in associated entries, over time, including editor attributions
• Comment on a document, proposing changes or in support or opposition
• Rate comments as to their accuracy, relevance, etc
• Flag a problem area, and view previously flagged problem areas

Applications

(the programmatic elements needed to fulfill the capabilities)

• Essentially the same as the consensus wiki/forum, but without the voting requirements.