newsAndPredictions-collaborativeSoftware

Years ago, i set out to learn what the latest and greatest ideas in collaborative software were. Unfortunately, i was never able to achieve my goal, because people are coming up with so many great ideas in this area.

I suppose that i should stop waiting until i am "up to date" and in the meantime make some notes for others.

Wikis

In my opinion, the most important recent development in this area is wiki. The world has realized that wikis can be used for encyclopedias, but it has not yet realized that wikis can be used as online discussion forums. There are many benefits to using wikis for discussion, including:

• Succinctness: rather than a web page accumulating a list of hundreds of comments on some topic, until no one reads through the whole list anymore, wiki pages are periodically "edited down" into a managable size.
• Hypertext: as a discussion diverges from the original topic, parts of the discussion can be moved to new pages.
• Organized by topic, rather than time: on a blog, a discussion happens and then ends. If you have something to add to it later, people may not notice. On a wiki, old discussions are not dead, they are just waiting to be revived.
• Consensus: since wiki pages are communal, rather than individual, property, camps of people with opposing viewpoints nevertheless find themselves collaborating in order to summarize the disagreement in a way that both camps can accept.
• Group spirit: since everyone is jointly responsible for all of the wiki pages,

A great example of a wiki discussion community is http://meatballwiki.org.

Some particularly important developments in the wiki world are:

• WikiMatrix?, which allows you to compare different wiki implementations
• Wagn.org, a relatively clean implementation of transclusion
• Oddmuse, my current favorite wiki engine
• the PortlandPatternRepository?, the original wiki

Collaborative real-time editors

Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be an open-source brower-based contender right now.

Google Docs is kind of slow and not incredibly intuitive to set up to be public, but it works.

Gobby seems to be the top non-browser-based open source contender.

Distributed version control software

Git and Mercurial (hg) are the top contenders. I use Mercurial.

Open source project hosting/management ("forges")

Open source themselves:

• Berlios
• http://launchpad.net (works with bazaar (bzr)) (social features) (written in Python)
• http://gitorious.com (works with git) (social features)

I currently use sourceforge. I forgot why I didn't switch to Berlios last time I investigated it -- maybe at that time they didn't offer CGI webhostnig, or didn't offer hg?

What I'd like is Launchpad with hg. Although people complain that Launchpad is a little slow and cluttered.

The following (proprietary) projects have been cited in various places for their clean, easy UI:

• Google Code
• github and Bitbucket (apparently gitorious is like github)
• http://lighthouseapp.com/ (issue tracking)
• http://37signals.com/'s stuff

here's a comparison of github's and launchpad's UI: http://lindsay.at/blog/archive/2009/05/07/launchpad-github-bitbucket.html

Trac and Redmine are open-source project hosting/management software. Trac is the frontrunner, but without an extension, it doesn't integrate multiple projects, so you have to run one instance per project (and have a bunch of different bug trackers to use, etc). But I think there are Trac extensions that do that. Redmine handles that, and is supposedly slicker, but it's not clear if it's actually better. http://www.indefero.net/ (written in PHP) is said to be open-source project hosting/management software that has a clean, easy UI (but it's young).

Some things you already know about

Tagging (e.g. http://del.icio.us), blogging (wordpress is a good software package), social networking (facebook seems to be the top one in the U.S., although it's not at all open source), social news (http://reddit, http://digg -- these sites suffer from the group polarization effect however), photosharing (http://flickr.com is (or was) a popular choice), lightweight file sharing (http://rapidshare.com)