Following on my series of posts about collaboration and Tinderbox (especially the one about patterns for teams to follow), Jessica Rubart sent me this truly staggeringly-fabulous set of suggestions.

Jessica is an experienced team manager, and a researcher on the use of Tinderbox-like spatial hypertext for team-based activities. Her latest project (brilliant) is an app which uses spatial hypertext to plan Scrum Meetings (more about scrum).

• Meeting structure:
  • Describing an agenda (notes in a column)
  • Adding references to documents (e.g. URLs)
• Team structure:
  • Persons and groups, e.g. through a composite note
  • Organizations and persons, e.g. through additional composite notes and aliases
  • Persons and roles
• Process structure:
  • Task notes as composite notes containing relevant document references
  • Workflows, i.e. task notes, process links, and maybe links to team structure
• Group forming (E-Learning):
  • Group areas for joining
  • Group recommendations through agents based on profiles of persons in the model
• Project plan:
  • Priority lists through spatial arrangement (E.g. Task lists for persons with dependency links to other tasks)
  • Date attributes for tasks
  • Status adornments for tasks, e.g. within a person composite note
  • Scrum-like task boards using adornments for setting tasks states (a state could be an attribute) and an agent for generating a sprint burn down chart from a current task board (this is good -- Nathan)
• Goals
• Recent changes:
  • In addition to a description of changes it might be useful to include a status of the tinderbox file or an area, saying e.g. that a review of person or role xy is required.
• Landing areas:
  • Adornments for groups of people who get the notes by e-mail, which one drops there
  • Adornments as a kind of todo-lists for users work items can be dropped there; after a user has completed the work on an item, he/she can drop it on the todo-list of the following user.
• Cooperative access:
  • Use version control and visual diff :-) (by this, Jessica is referring to my ongoing work on comparing changes in Tinderbox files)
  • Further development could think about splitting a tinderbox file into several parts that could be put into a version control system separately. Then, those different parts can be locked by different people at the same time so that simultaneous work on different parts of the shared model is possible. Alternatively, one could use different files for each part. But then linking between those might be constrained.
  • Use application sharing for synchronous access, e.g. through WebEx (Nathan: This is a great idea)
• Brainstorming/Mind Mapping:
  • Use application sharing for synchronous sessions
• Mashups:
  • Composing notes from different files or different areas of one file
  • Providing a merged view of notes and resources on the web that somehow are related to the notes
• Overview:
  • Guided tour (this can be done with Tinderbox Demo/Tutorial format)
  • Reading advice (see above)