Message Gardening and Content Fluidity

[erlend-sh]

Long version: https://blog.muni.town/chatty-community-gardens/

Life of a digital message

Messages are living information artifacts. As content blobs they can morph through many different forms, from ephemeral musings to everlasting tomes of shared understandings.

Let's consider the lifecycle of a message as contained and transferred through digital mediums.

• Thinking mind
  At first there's just a thought. Let's say this one isn't even written down anywhere. It just exists as some vague idea in someone's head.

• Chatty ideation
  Once a message is expressed in a chat room it has taken on its initial form for the purpose of storage & transmission. After some back-and-forth the core of the message will become evident as a recurring topic of discussion.

• Threaded idea composites
  A series of related messages can then be glued together to make a thread. By synthesizing multiple chatty idea fragments into a cohesive micro-thesis, the flow of discussion can be focused towards an end-goal. In the context of a thread, comments are written in response to the opening thesis, as opposed to in a chatty context where you're generally responding to any message immediately preceding yours.

• Article synthesis
  With a draft thesis sufficiently scrutinized and supplemented, a final synthesis brings it all together into a carefully edited article; a fully grown knowledge artifact. And at every stage of our message exchange, each new bit of information feeds back into our collective minds to form new thoughts.

Not every message takes this exact path, but the above is a common example of how community software acts as a seeding ground for ideas to go from noisy information blobs to restful knowledge gardens. For current group-messaging software this is the gap that needs filling.

Related

Chatting with glue
Outward notes, inward notes
Unconscious R&D

[erlend-sh]

View Modes: Chat/Threads

What does this end up looking like in terms of a UI? We need to add discrete view-modes to channels. Something along these lines.

Specifically what I wanna see in Roomy is a 3-part tabs-button in the middle of the channel header here.

There would be three selections available: Chat / Threads / (Wiki)

Different views into the same channel.

The only thing we really need to concern ourselves with for starters is Chat / Threads though. That’s something basically every channel in any space will have. Discord already has this too, they just don’t expose the threads feed effectively, instead they try to hide it.

Wiki will come into play later. Think of every channel’s top-level wiki page as a ‘super-pin’, I.e. the page that explains in richer detail what that channel is all about, along with the capability of being continuously updated with new posts/threads attached to it for additional context. It’s the penultimate ‘get up to speed on this space’ page. Just having a wiki-section in the Threads view might suffice.

Related

• Timeline sidebar #23

[erlend-sh]

Fluid Content Containers

Some cases of Content Fluidity to start considering now that we’re further along:

• convert a thread to a channel (expand room size)
• convert a channel to a thread (good for archiving)
• move selected posts from one channel to another
• move thread from one channel to another
• move thread to another Space
• move channel to another Space (change owners)
• move select posts from one thread to another
• merge two threads
• merge two channels
• merge two spaces

[erlend-sh]

Another good example of content fluidity:

• Non-chronological post ordering #30