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Re:Doug Engelbart’s design for knowledge-based organizations... by majormajor on Friday September 02, 2022 @07:40PM (#32696977)
Maybe I'm too software-development-oriented but I feel like the blocks are tantalizingly close to being ready for multi-user. EDIT: To the point of frustration with how things like that are still silo'd away. Seems like so much work has been done around like "concurrent editing" (Notion seems like a big improvement over Confluence here, but still seemed to be the same page-based world just with a better editor) but so little around what documentation are we actually building for teams?

In my head they're akin methods, and so in software that idea of "call this from lots of different places, edit it in a centralized way" concept is pretty well established.

In terms of "a single document flowing with a single voice" you can't necessarily do that from assembling an arbitrary collection of blocks like that, but for "good enough for effective in-corp collaboriation"? Sure!

Re:Doug Engelbart’s design for knowledge-based organizations... by groby_b on Friday September 02, 2022 @09:01PM (#32697504)
Maybe. The problem with multi-user blocks is the same as with methods in software - Hyrum's law. People will rely on them staying as-implemented vs as-spec'd.

I think that (and the problem of bait-and-switch) still need an answer before it's usable beyond small groups. Maybe small groups is good enough for now. If it goes in any form like software development, we'll at some point split into two camps. One will say YOLO and just implement shared blocks, trusting in good will, and the other group will noodle on foundational principles to get this right. (Group 1 will make the money, group 2 will have the fun. As always ;)