Pete Forsyth considered what qualities an environment needs to support effective collaboration, initially at the 2015 Future of Text symposium 
. He outlined seven (now eight) software features or characteristics that provide for individual agency in collaborative writing. The idea is to identify necessary and sufficient features of a collaboration space, whether real or virtual. Ward Cunningham dubbed the set of features the "Forsyth Criteria."
This page is for refining the list of features or characteristics. Pete is interested to hear from anybody interested in the topic.
YOUTUBE O-ykvRYsk2o Published on Sep 8, 2016
See also Pete's Collected Talks
Pete's seven features are well supported by the mediawiki software hosting Wikipedia. This is beneficial to community members; the nature of implementation also makes many of the features beneficial to critical readers. pdf
- __that__ some content has changed (watchlists, recent changes) - exactly __what__ was changed (including access to the original version) (diffs) - __who__ made the change (user names, presented in various reports) - __when__ they made it (date stamps, presented in various reports) - __why__ they made it (edit summaries, entered optionally, presented in various reports)
- __address__ the person who changed it - __undo__ the changes of others - __create__ changes of one’s own
Ward separated the capabilities into mechanisms of observation and those of action, the environment facing parts of the OODA loop. wikipedia
I discussed these ideas at the following Future of Text symposium as well (see the first ~7 minutes of this video, especially starting about 5:00). For some reason the link isn't working...try this: video
Spaces to Evaluate by their effective or missing criteria.
Failure to Communicate when meta-information (i.e. goals) is not shared.
Unexpected Federation Practices that might be worth adding.