Colloquium at Stanford
The Unfinished Revolution


Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 16:59:06 -0800


From:   Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com
Reply-To: unrev-II@onelist.com

To:     unrev-II@ONELIST.COM

Subject:   Traction "Journaling System," by Twisted Systems

Doug Engelbart - Bootstrap Institute wrote on 26 Mar 2000 13:44 PST

Christopher Nuzum....demonstrated the Traction System; quite impressive. Calls it a "journaling system" for keeping track of many tpes of ongoing events, thoughts, interactions, etc. Something we should learn about; functions that should be a part of everbody's future DKR workshop.

http://www.twisted-systems.com

Nuzum, Chris -- cell (401) 268-9099. / cjn@twisted-systems.com,

He plans to visit our area between 9 and 15 April; Offers to present/discuss with any of our group -- or, could be at our Wed 12-Apr meeting.

I look forward to hearing more about this. It does look interesting.

Here is one tidbit from their site:

With Traction, you can flag paragraphs of the same entry with tags like suggestion, contact, competition and todo. With the interactive form, it's as easy as adding a color-coded Post-ItTM flag to a paper document.

This ability to "categorize" information nodes is fundamental to anything we want to do.

Two questions spring to mind:

  1. Can the same node be in multiple categories (that needs to be possible)

  2. Theirs is a server-side system, yes? So any change in categorization is seen by everyone, yes?

    1. Who gets to make those changes?

    2. In a distributed email-style system, are all such categorizations still seen by everyone? Or is there a separate "publish" step to make them visible?


Sincerely,



Eric Armstrong
eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com