docs.plus

get everyone on the same page! Tweets by @edsaperia

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

Hello world, this is @edsaperia, team lead & product manager of @docsdotplus. I’m going to start using this account as a fairly chatty development diary, so people can follow our journey creating this new tool!

[Edward Saperia @edsaperia]

I'm working on an open source project https://t.co/7hTySvjMFd that is experimenting with collaborative documents as community spaces. Check out some cool new experimental features! https://t.co/12Gjfh2AEi

[Edward Saperia @edsaperia]

I desperately need people to help me stress test some open source software at midday today UK time. Can you RT this even if you can’t participate? Details are here: https://t.co/bjCqytrSUk

[Edward Saperia @edsaperia]

Please help me stress test some open source videochat software 🙏🙏🙏 tomorrow at 12 BST: https://t.co/bjCqytrSUk

[Edward Saperia @edsaperia]

Please help: I need a few people to help me record a gif of some video software I’m working on. You won’t need to do anything complicated, just have it open in a tab for a few mins. I hope to start at 21:30 (in ten minutes); please reply to this tweet if you’re willing.

[Hannah O'Rourke @Hannah_O_Rourke]

Great couple of days for @campaignlab_! We had brilliant volunteer teams working an app to increase phonebanking, a prototype method for Facebook Group campaigning & useful research done on persuasion/behaviour change! The online format worked brilliantly thanks to @docsdotplus !

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

We’re still battling with making video work well - turns out this is trickier than we expected 🚦

Any webrtc experts, do get in touch, we’d love some advice! 🙏

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

It’s been a quiet few weeks - we’ve been doing lots of behind the scenes stuff - migrating to digitalocean, changing to mongodb - which has stopped us releasing new features. 🛶

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

However, coming very soon is a whole new user profile system and login flow 🚁

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

Profiles are also going to be a very light anti-vandalism/spam friction; users without verified emails can’t do actions that generate emails for others, and users with complete profiles (even if pseudonymous) will have access to some extra features.

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

The other thing that we’re working on at the moment is user profiles. We’re focused on the idea of documents as community hubs, and so letting people see each others’ pictures, bios and homepages is important. 🦆

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

You can keep up with this work here: https://t.co/MAJ9yaoWgU

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

The video on https://t.co/gNbsDr8T9O is vanilla webrtc, which is not great! It fails in low bandwidth situations and struggles with more than a couple of participants. This week we’ll be deploying a bunch of improvements that should make it much more reliable 🦦

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

Finally, we’re switching to a better video codec (vp9 & opus) 🐅

All these things together should mean all the issues that most users experience. They should be finished and deployed by the end of the week! 🐠

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

There’s a conspicuous wiki-shaped gap in contemporary software at the moment. Mediawiki is a workhorse but hard to set up and doesn’t conform to modern UX requirements. Various challengers like Notion & Roam are designed for teams rather than communities.

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

This week, the team is working on improving the stability of videochat, and a better experience around user accounts and login.

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

The challenge for groups comes when they are recruiting quickly, and are continually outgrowing the spaces they inhabit. Spaces are very sticky, and new spaces create new navigation and governance challenges.

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

At @nwspk I have been studying how civil society groups organise online & in person for about seven years. The motivation for @docsdotplus came from a few different observations. The first is simply that organising is difficult, and most groups fail to make the change they want.

[docs.plus @docsdotplus]

Optimal is organising in spaces that feel slightly too small; not so much that activity is impaired, but enough that it feels vibrant and active. This is not just about numbers, but also tempo and culture.