This all started with Julie writing to me to ask about collaborative editing software, and describing the project. She wanted to do a live projection and web broadcast of a collaborative editing session with several women. She had been thinking of piratepad but wanted substantially different visuals.
This post is a summary of my analysis and technical solutions. Last night, I was still buzzing from the actual performance, and wrote a very different post reflecting my experience of it.
I took a brief inventory of every collaborative editing software I knew of and had actually used:
I quickly wrote down my goals:
- It would be best to use a web based client to avoid having to install a client on multiple computers. This excluded gobby.
- I need to be able to run this thing on a laptop or on my puny little vserver.
- I need to be able to customize the look and feel of the interface for the performance.
- I would have to squeeze this project in around my regular working hours, so I needed to keep the number of new things to learn to a minimum.
After a couple of hours of cursory research, I quickly decided that etherpad-lite was the best candidate. I passed on my conclusions to Julie and we set a first meeting and test at the gallery, Skol.
