The functionality and power in frassle is growing a lot right now, with the creation of the site builder and usability improvements in the aggregator. The site builder will keep me occupied for a while, but when it's done it will demand a new kind of feature: support for collaboration.

Collaboration is an interesting issue in frassle. On one hand, a fundamental assumption in frassle is that categories are personal and we need ways to gradually learn correlations between different organizational systems. On the other hand, there are some times when you want to work within an explicitly agreed-upon category hierarchy. This usually happens when you're working in a close-knit group with clear goals.

Right now I'm involved in starting this kind of group. It looks like our first project will be developing a comparison of aggregators. I think it would be useful to use frassle to build this comparison: a note would represent one aggregator, and we'd categorize that note according to what features that aggregator had. For example, we'd create a note for SharpReader and put in under /platform/Windows, /display style/3-pane, and /features/tracks which items you've read.

The category system here is something we want to all share. It probably won't be feasible for a single person to review every aggregator, but we have to stick to the same criteria.

Today frassle binds one user to one feed. So I may well have to start this project by creating a fake user account, giving the password to my colleagues, and (as far as frassle is concerned) all acting like one person.

This is kind of like stepping into a corporate role; you log out of the frassle user that normally catches all your writing—the personal role—and enter an entity that looks like a user but is actually the collective effort of whoever has the password. This is an appealing metaphor and I wonder if all frassle needs is a way to do this without the graceless kludge of sharing a password.

Other possibilities:

  • Shared categories. All users have access to a certain set of categories. They can each add things into one of these categories, as well as add, remove, move, or rename the categories themselves.
  • Subscribing to categories. All users subscribe to one user's category tree. When that user changes her tree, the changes are offered to each subscriber, who must accept them into their own tree. This is an interesting possibility, and could perhaps be a layer on top of shared categories. Also, it is not just one-way; if Alice and Bob wanted to fully share control of a tree, they would both subscribe to each other. The change approval system would be a good way to ensure that changes are made obvious to everyone involved.

Still, all of these approaches are pretty abstract. How do you think it should work?