Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016/T112984

T112984 - This is the session pad for the Real Time Collaboration session, slated to begin at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, January 5th.

Purpose
We have the backend infrastructure mostly in place for real time collaborative editing. But actually rolling out collaborative editing requires more than just the Visual Editor team. It will require a coordinated effort to re-imagine what editing is like. We will need mechanisms to create user groups, real time chat mechanisms, mechanisms to temporarily persist collaborative sessions, perhaps even new core mechanisms for describing revisions (at the very least, revisions can have multiple authors!). We also need to think about social mechanisms and preventing harassment and vandalism of collaborative sessions. Pau has given us a starting point we can discuss, but we need to achieve broad consensus on the overall direction, refine the details, and figure out how to get there from here, with a unified roadmap across design, services, and editing.

Agenda

 * 20 minutes - introductory presentation (recap of previous design work)
 * 45 minutes - open discussion
 * 10 minutes - wrap up

Etherpad
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikiDev16-T112984

Goals

 * Agree on a concrete "next step", whether that is a UX experiment or a backend implementation task (support for temporary storage of in-process edits, for example).
 * Discuss community implications, and develop a plan for managing harassment/abuse/etc in a real-time collaborative environment.
 * Agree on broad-stroke integration of collaborative UX into our current mediawiki skin. The existing design prototypes have been built against Winter, and we need to figure out how the pieces can be built on top of the skin we actually use (or a new standalone prototype needs to be built).

Chronology
''This section is where an attempt is made to capture the gist of who said what, in what order. A transcript isn't necessary, but it's useful to capture the important points made by speakers as they happen.''