TaskCloud

Concept for an IssueTracker working across a loosely-formed group of people, each of whom is in multiple such groups, so a single unitary SaaS would be in inappropriate. cf Graph-driven SoftwareForge, (2013-07-15) Taco Task Hub, Object Browser, Group-forming, Software Bootstrap As DAO, microformat, Webs Of Thinkers And Thoughts, open source, portfolio life...

Context/goals/problem

• A group/coalition wants to make progress towards an outcome/goal/deliverable, but most members are not full-time.

Meta/related: what about non-task items?

• A team wiki?
• A Garden Warren?
• Or are tasks just a slightly-special case of graph-node: Graph-driven SoftwareForge?

Forces:

• Different people have different amounts of time to offer.
• A given person's time investment will change over time.
• Different people have different kinds of skills to offer (dev, strategy, design, marketing/marcom, community growing).
• Even if participating for intrinsic reasons, having the possibility of a financial compensation can increase motivation (note counter-arguments where motivation is reduced by rewards).
• People will participate in multiple groups. Some are even offline!
• Some groups are public/transparent, others are closed/private.
• People don't want their out-of-group tasks visible to the group/public.
• Running software (in the cloud) costs money.
• Some tasks/deliverables are more urgent/important at a given point in time to deliver value.
• If one person is 20% done with a task and gets busy with other things, it might make sense for someone else to take it over.
• If one person is 80% done with a task and gets busy with other things, it might not make sense for someone else to take it over.
• Tasks should be integrated into a wiki (and DVCS, if there's any software being built) → SoftwareForge
• Within a group....
• ??

Candidate (existing) solutions

• Github issues (or gitlab?). Not much of a fan
• Redmine/TracWiki - for $20/mo for hosting, maybe just worth it
  • see open-group versions: Better Means, Love Machine
• Taco app (or Akiflow) as user-app for cross-group tasks assigned to you
  • hmm PESOS vs "should FluxGarden have a ToDoList feature?"

A take by Venkatesh Rao, complaining about pseudo-web3 tools... Discourse, Roam, Social Warrens....

Let's say I want to build something that handles this plus discussion (e.g. Graph-Driven Software Forge)....

• if everything's a fractal cloud, how do you (a) control access, (b) scope NameSpace
• it smells like the fundamental UX challenge is (a) following the right set of stuff...?
• every node has a UUID; it can optionally also have a WikiName/PetName
• an "instance" can support a single user, a "team"/"project"/"space", or multiple teams/projects/spaces
  • an instance caches the union of nodes followed by its users
• (for a small organization, should that be a single space? Why does it matter? How do multiple spaces "within" an "organization" get managed?))
• 2 big questions/issues
  • can a node be edited? (cf ScuttleButt's version of this)
  • if this is supposed to support "discussion", does it need to be real-time, a slack.com replacement? Need a CRDT? Yes it needs something pretty real-time, but the CRDT is only when people are simultaneously editing a single node, which will be relatively rare (before that, we can have a locking mechanism).

Back-to-basics

• what problem am I trying to solve? For whom?
  • I want an infinitely-threaded discussion (graph, not infinite-hierarchy)
  • I want an infinite-task-graph
  • I want people to adopt it, but People Don't Want To Run Their Own Servers, not even in the Personal Cloud.
• what's the adoption-growth model?
  • would I use this myself?
    • my main complexity needs are for dayjob - My CollaborationWare History
    • I could use this to organize my own work
    • I could slide it into use when there's a messy discussion/decision to work on (but what SSO would i use?) (it's been an effort to get people to recognize that Slack-flat-thread doesn't work well).
• then offer as SaaS plus open-source it?
  • this would probably stick with the "formal group controls a space"
  • would it be possible to build a cross-space view for a single user?
• this lead to moving non-decentralized notes below to TeamGarden

Some specific user scenarios (focused on the decentralized aspects)

• I dream up a project, I define a "space" for it
• I write some docs in that space
• then I decide I want to get other folks involved in 1 of them....
• so I make a new space
• and I move the "top" of that project to the new space...
• all the children are now inherently moved to that space
• which means you need to be a little more thoughtful about picking the node to spin off a new node from, since that becomes its parent
• I can make that space read-public, write-invite
• then I define a group for that space - I'm automatically a member, and the administrator
  • administrators are the only ones who can invite new members, or change any node rights
  • a group can have multiple administrators
  • maybe a smaller group of super-admins who have ultimate control (root space/group) (could think of this as just 1 but with redundance/backup)
• I add people to the group page, and send invites (email? DM?).
  • when someone accepts, they set their WikiName
    • can I save my own PetName for someone? I suppose that could be auto-translated when I save a node.... but that raises weird uniqueness games...?
  • as admin I can set each person to read-or-write-or-admin
• before accepting each invitee needs to pick an instance?
  • my instance might accept other users. Maybe that's temporarily free, or maybe it's free if limited to the space I created?
  • a user identifies their instance when they join; they can change it at any time, but there's just 1 per person
  • a user could belong to separate instances for separate projects/spaces? Is this necessary?
  • if I "run" a "company", am I ok with an "employee" mirroring their nodes to a different instance? What happens when they leave? I remove them from the space, and their instance purges all the nodes from that space? Can I trust that?
• SecondMember has his own instance, joins project/space
  • his instance caches the root node; then it lists all the children+backlinks to that node, for SecondMember to pick which ones to follow/cache
  • when you follow a node, you automatically follows its children. But for every node, you see a Follow checkbox, and you can turn it off for any node at any time. (You can always change your mind later.)
• I assign a task to SecondMember... he she accepts
• She adds a subtask to that task - it starts on her instance, but because I'm following the original task my instance automatically picks up the subtask
• She can add a private subtask
• a task has a single Status at a time: InPrep, ReadyForWork, InProcess, InReview, Completed, Abandoned. (multiple sets of status are possible, controlled at the Space level?)