Waves and uncooperative behavior

[Daniele (Dan) Mazzini]

Hello everybody. Waves look like a terrific new concept.

I was wondering, though, if you already considered use cases where
some participants in a wave start behaving uncooperatively. I run a
political forum, and waves could be a wonderful solution to many of
our needs, but the whole idea of somebody freely modifying what other
people wrote brings very high risks with itself. As we all know,
especially on the internet, any subject - even some much less
debatable than politics - can generate very heated discussions...

I remember mentioning flame wars in the keynote, so I guess you
already thought about that kind of situations, but did you also find
possible solutions?

Thinking about my own use case, I imagined a moderation process that
I'd like to experiment, but never had the time to try and implement on
current platforms because it would require too much work to fill the
gaps. But it looks to me like with waves many of the required features
would already be there, so it might be possible to implement just
using the API, maybe adding a few features to them.

I'd like to know if you already have a different solution to the
problem; if not, if you see my idea possible to implement with the API
(I would for sure try to do that myself if there is support from the
platform), or of course if you consider it or something similar
interesting and general enough that you could implement it yourselves
(to which of course I wouldn't have any objection!).

So, the use case works like this. When you create a wave, you invite
people to it. They could be just a few trusted friends, or more people
that you don't know so well. And those people, if I understood
correctly, could even invite more people.

In the latter case, the owner (starter) of the wave gives different
rights to people; specifically, some can directly commit edits, some
can only propose them (by the way, is there already a way to limit
rights, eg some people can edit but not invite, some can comment but
not modify, some can only read?). When somebody proposes an edit, the
owner (and possibly other moderators) gets notified, and can accept or
refuse it. Other people in the wave can also see the proposed edit,
but can't accept it (it would be nice to be able to vote the proposal,
but I think this should be easy wight gadgets).

If the owner rejects the edit, the proponent of that edit, instead of
starting a flame war, can fork the wave; in the new fork, of course he
(or she) is the owner. Everybody in the original wave should be
notified (and/or automatically included in the wave). If there is a
reconciliation, there could later be a merge.

If a flame war starts anyway, the owner of each fork can mute (or even
ban) those who they want to. This gives the owner a very big power,
but with the forking mechanism he (or she) can't stop other people to
continue on their own terms. This should allow things to cool down.

Forking and merging should already be there from what I saw, so I
think this kind of mechanism shouldn't be difficult to implement.
Keeping an edit on hold and having different rights, though, could
benefit from support from the platform (even if I guess it would be
possible to implement them with robots and gadgets). I'd like to know
your opinion on this.

Thanks

Dan

[\x00]

My understanding is you have to enable collaborative editing in the
first place.

[Robbe]

I would agree all indications exist in the video and write-ups that
collaboration is an enabled process, but what Dan touches on goes
slightly beyond mere collaboration and delves into roles bounding the
act of collaboration. I too would appreciate the ability to define
roles in the collaborative process and directly see the importance of
reviewing proposed edits before approving them or allowing just anyone
to post.

Great ideas Dan.

Robbe

[Jorge Vargas]

I totally agree with you this is something that needs a lot of work.
In summary the "wave group" could
a- kick someone out (could be done by gadget, like on the gaming servers)
b- make some items never change (like the original discussion points)
because the author is not interested in that wave turning into who
knows what.

I believe this issue kind of helps with the problem
http://code.google.com/p/google-wave-resources/issues/detail?id=7

> Thanks
>
> Dan
> >
>

[Dan Netwalker]

Couldn't this be implemented as a plugin, or there is no way for a
plugin to define if a fork/revision of a wave is read-only/readwrite
for/by each user?

[Bob Oliver Bigellow XLII]

I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to write a robot which
takes part in the wave. Then this robot can essentially play "police"
by preventing some actions by some people. The robot can store its
settings for a given wave within a wavelet that only this robot is a
member of.

[Jorge Vargas]

I though of this but. It will kill the history stuff.

For example you could write a bot that will undo the last change if
it's made by X. That will not be nice on the history if for example
someone is insisting.

[Bob Oliver Bigellow XLII]

Wave is a tool to allow us to communicate. It's not going to exactly
make people communicate the way we want them to. If people start
getting unruly in your Waves, just don't invite them to the next Wave.

[Jorge Vargas]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Bob Oliver Bigellow XLII
<iam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Wave is a tool to allow us to communicate.  It's not going to exactly
> make people communicate the way we want them to.  If people start
> getting unruly in your Waves, just don't invite them to the next Wave.
>

That's too bad if you are writing say a book invite reviewers. does
that means you need to drop the book and start over?

I think something with the branching should be build. Like make a
branch and kill the wave, after all I know there is some sort of
ownership only from the creator, into the app and/or protocol.

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:52 PM, \x00 <dt01p...@yahoo.com> wrote:

My understanding is you have to enable collaborative editing in the
first place.

Yes, but once you enable it how much control have you got over it? That's what I was wondering.

Dan

[Vladimír Oraný]

I share this idea with Jorge. Wave should be great for something what
could be called "social book writing". But it would be nice whether
only few people can contribute book and all the world can leave a
comment. For example what I mean look to Django Book
http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter01/
Maybe there should by declared new role besides creators and
contributors which allows adding new blips but not editing original
ones.

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:02 AM, Jorge Vargas <jorge....@gmail.com> wrote:

I though of this but. It will kill the history stuff.

For example you could write a bot that will undo the last change if
it's made by X. That will not be nice on the history if for example
someone is insisting.

This is an interesting point... I think that it would be very useful if robots were able to prevent changes before they got recorded in the history. Maybe this is already possible though.

Dan

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 4:57 AM, Bob Oliver Bigellow XLII <iam...@gmail.com> wrote:

Wave is a tool to allow us to communicate.  It's not going to exactly
make people communicate the way we want them to.  If people start
getting unruly in your Waves, just don't invite them to the next Wave.

My understanding is that Google wants waves to to be useful in a whole lot of use cases (like email, but much better than email). Addressing uncooperative behavior is, in my opinion, very very important to have a wide adoption.

Dan

[Jorge Piqué]

(sorry, my English is so bad)
Daniele, this is a very important issue in my opinion. Programmers
forget that it is all about social relations, and you simply can't
give all controll to all people in all cases. There are cases where
it's OK no control al all, but it is so easy for a person destroy a
good project only because he has bad feelings about a wave.

So flexibility in the control is the better option. The wave owner can
give all control to the "wavers" when for exemple there are only 3-5
friends that are creating something, or, in the extreme oposite case,
keep all control. Between these 2 opposite posibilities it will be
good define intermediate control by means of types of wavers:
1. w-owner (it can be more than one, like a co-owner)
2. w-editor, that can edit text in the wave
3. w-commentator, that can only put a comment, question or suggestion
in the wave
4. w-reader, that only can read the wave

Another point is where these roles can act:
1. all wave
2. in a sub-wave
3. in a especific discussion
4. only for specif wavers

I don´t like the idea of fork the wave for reasons of diffent opinions
(it is great for means of better organization). This will create a
relation between waves that are opposite and it could create bad
feelings. But I understand why Daniele propose it. Each waver has his
oppinion and it must be respected.
My suggestion:
1. if there is this kind of problem, people can create another wave,
without any relation with the original wave.
2. if people don't want create a new wave, there will be a space in
his profile with all edits or comments rejected. So people have to go
to the profile to read them, they would't be part of a wave after
rejected.

This is a very interesting point and I hope Google discuss it in deep.
Jorge

[David Peterson]

Waves in their original form don't seem to be a good place to have
'mass viewing'. I think the method will be more along the lines of the
'Bloggie' robot, where you publish your wave somewhere else. I'm not
certain, but I'm guessing that random people can't edit the original
message when it's published via Bloggie. This gives the balance
between public readership and editing control. Whether or not it's
published to a blog, I think the same principal will probably apply.

Another example from the demo was where the two of them created on
wave together, then Lars created a new Wave containing just the 'final
version', which was then published to the public.

I do agree though - forking is a bit of a weakness in a lot of cases.
I would like to see some level of finer-grained permission control
too.

David

[guruvan (Rob Nelson)]

Not only will you have to enable the collaborative editing, but it
would also appear that for any features not present in the software
itself, there could easily be a robot written thatcould control all
the additional permissions that one might want to assign in the wave.
I would think that you could establish very granular control of the
the changes made in a wave.


On May 30, 1:53 pm, "Daniele (Dan) Mazzini"

[Jorge Piqué]

Sorry again for my mistakes writing in English.
(the discussion below is about Google Wave, not Wave in other servers,
they are two different kinds of service)

I was thinking about and maybe there is a miscompreension of social
relations in Wave of my part. Dan and I are interesting in other types
of social relationship in the web. Dan run a political forum and I am
interested in cientific discussion groups. This imply open communities
and maybe the social model behind Wave is focused un more closed
groups, like friends, collegues and family. In these cases the owner
add a new member, but that is a part of his social life, a friend, or
a friend of a friend of a friend.
In this case it is not necessary too much control, because you trust
in the person you add.

Facebook is a social network focus in these closed groups. There are
groups of discussion, but they are not the essence of this social
network. By the demosntration you add new member that you know before
in some away. But you never will add a person that is in the other
side of the planet, without any relation with you or your friends,
family, etc. Or waves can be public like forums or groups/communities?

I am more interested in groups or communities where people in general
aren't friends or families, etc, but exactly because they are not my
friends they can give more importan contribution to the discussion .
But in this case it will be necessary the kind of control that dan
discuss in this topic, uncooperative behavior-

So maybe Wave is more productive to this kind of personal relations
(family, friends , collegues, neighbours, etc) and forums in general
and some social networks are more focused in general or professional
discussion. I know that it is possible to implement this kind of
waves, but I don't know if this is the intention or the philosophy of
this project. To be posible it will be necessary some search for all
waves (public waves) and I don't know if will be a good idea to create
so many waves about the same object, for example, asp.net, italian
democracy, greek philosophy, that will be without use, like millions
of groups that exist now, and really are not active, funcional,
arenas.

My doubt is if Wave must be all the things that exist in internet, or
simply be the side more personal of internet, where friends, family,
work colleagues, etc, can easily interact. (more extended communities
can be created in Waves in other servers)

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 6:47 PM, Jorge Piqué <jorge...@gmail.com> wrote:

My doubt is if Wave must be all the things that exist in internet, or
simply be the side more personal of internet, where friends, family,
work colleagues, etc,  can easily interact. (more extended communities
can be created in Waves in other servers)

I see your point Jorge, but if waves want to be the email of the future, they need for sure to be able to handle situations where you don't know very well all the participants. Emails are written very very often in that kind of situations. Moreover, you can always start having a heated discussion even with your close friends, you never know ;)

Dan

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 6:07 PM, guruvan (Rob Nelson) <gur...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not only will you have to enable the collaborative editing, but it
would also appear that for any features not present in the software
itself, there could easily be a robot written thatcould control all
the additional permissions that one might want to assign in the wave.
I would think that you could establish very granular control of the
the changes made in a wave.

Writing a robot for that would be a possible solution. But there are still two kind of problems: first of all, you need go give robots some specific features needed to do that (eg being able to prevent some changes to be registered in the history, maybe more). Second, if this is an enough common use case, it would be better to have at least the basics standardized and embedded in the protocol itself (for example, different participation/invitation levels). That's what I would like to hear about.

But I guess I can wait for the team to get back to Australia to have an answer :)

Bye

Dan

[Daniele Mazzini]

On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Jorge Piqué <jorge...@gmail.com> wrote:

My suggestion:
1. if there is this kind of problem, people can create another wave,
without any relation with the original wave.

But if you contributed to the wave as it is at the time of the fork, it wouldn't be really fair if you had to start from scratch a new one. Even a simple copy and paste could do, but this would be... very un-wavy :)

 

2. if people don't want create a new wave, there will be a space in
his profile with all edits or comments rejected. So people have to go
to the profile to read them, they would't be part of a wave after
rejected.

Yes, if it is possible to reject edits in the first place though!

Bye

Dan

 

[Jorge Vargas]

I don't think the robot is a good answer, this needs to be at a lower
level. For example say a malicious user create a bot that prevents
everyone from writting and kicks everyone from the wave, then deploys
1000 of these at random email address that look like people?

> Bye
> Dan
> >
>

[Dan Netwalker]

On May 31, 4:57 am, Bob Oliver Bigellow XLII <iam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wave is a tool to allow us to communicate.  It's not going to exactly
> make people communicate the way we want them to.  If people start
> getting unruly in your Waves, just don't invite them to the next Wave.

The main problem I see is, people may start getting unruly, but...
bots *will* get unruly. I'm thinking of spam bots.

Wave can be integrated on ANY web page. As a content creation
infrastructure, as a comment system, as a bidirectional way of
communication between web page "owner" and web page "visitors". We
have seen it a thousand times on wikis (wikipedia fights it daily).
There must be a way to control this problem without waiting for the
offense to happen.

[Damian Guppy]

There are access controls built into the protocol itself according to the spec, so i dont think this will be much of a problem

[Jorge Vargas]

*sigh* I need to go around correcting all your answers :) the protocol
has per wave access control. This is about inside the wave access
control. it is a big issue.

[Jorge Piqué]

On May 31, 11:27 pm, Daniele Mazzini <daniele.mazz...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> I see your point Jorge, but if waves want to be the email of the future,
> they need for sure to be able to handle situations where you don't know very
> well all the participants. Emails are written very very often in that kind
> of situations. Moreover, you can always start having a heated discussion
> even with your close friends, you never know ;)

Dan, this is the point, Wave is an "email of the future" only, or more
than that?
Ok to include people I don't know in a Wave, I send email for people I
don't know, you are right.

But forums or communies/groups are more than just emails to strangers,
is not a one to one comunication.
For example this group Google Wave API has more then 500 members, it
will be possible as a wave?
Probably yes, but I don't see an advantage of a Wave in this case,
more then a community in a social network.
Bigger social groups need rules, sometimes, but a better email maybe
not.
By the way I speak of groups with certain human administration. In the
case of this group, Google Wave API, people can do what they want and
nobody will take an actitud.

You are right when you say that you can have " a heated discussion
even with your close friends", but if you exclude a friend, certainly
he will not see you as a friend too. So in the case of closer people,
lile family, friends, colleagues or some few people that the user
don't know, there is not necessity of social rules or even reject
edits.

But the question is: Wave want be more than a fantastic email, were
conversations are organized and with a lot of tools, or want include
also the tipe of social relation that we found in forums or social
networks?
Any way, if Wave is a better email that improve colaboration, in this
case it will be necessary some rules, like reject edit, but not
complexes rules that really are necessary for more complex social
relations on internet, like forums and social networks.
A social network like Facebook is in fact a lot of little communities
of firends, family, colleagues, without a bigger objetive. In this
case, like Wave, it is not necessary too much regularizarion.

When you ask for more capacity of regularization of more complex
virtual community I understand your point, because I have the same
necessity. The problem is that programmers that create forums and
social networks in fact have a simpler idea of these communities, and
this is teh reason because a great number of forums and communities
don't work well in internet. The owner of a forum or a community
dont't have the necessary tools to administrate in a good sense, i.e.,
improving colaboration and not accepting uncooperative behavior. We
have only two situations or a radical democracy where anyone do what
he want or the administrator or moderator can ban any member that has
a different opinion. Both situations can destroy the the group
cohesion.

It will be better if we have more refinate tools to administrate
conflicts in these more complex virtual communities, but I don't know
if Wave is the solution for this. "I don't know" here means only "I
don't know" ;-)
Maybe the excitement caused by Wave make people create robots or other
tools that can help other people that want use internet for deeper
discussion and that need this tools. But for me this is not the
objetive of this project. For example, I can't see how integrate a
wave in my social network, because the identity in the wave is
different of the indentity of a member in a social network (virtual
identities, in general social networks, are too much simple to be
usefull in my opinion). Use a wave as a space for discussion in a
specific social network will lose the specificity. In a case o a
forum, no, because a forum or a group in general don't give deep
information about people, and people can't really create an identity
(if they want).
Sorry I wrote too much, but this subject is too much interesting.
Jorge

[Jorge Vargas]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Jorge Piqué <jorge...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On May 31, 11:27 pm, Daniele Mazzini <daniele.mazz...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> I see your point Jorge, but if waves want to be the email of the future,
>> they need for sure to be able to handle situations where you don't know very
>> well all the participants. Emails are written very very often in that kind
>> of situations. Moreover, you can always start having a heated discussion
>> even with your close friends, you never know ;)
>
> Dan, this is the point, Wave is an "email of the future" only, or more
> than that?
> Ok to include people I don't know in a Wave, I send email for people I
> don't know, you are right.
>
> But forums or communies/groups are more than just emails to strangers,
> is not a one to one comunication.
> For example this group Google Wave API  has more then 500 members, it
> will be possible as a wave?
> Probably yes, but I don't see an advantage of a Wave in this case,
> more then a community in a social network.
> Bigger social groups need rules, sometimes, but a better email maybe
> not.
> By the way I speak of groups with certain human administration. In the
> case of this group, Google Wave API, people can do what they want and
> nobody will take an actitud.
>

oh course a ML will be replaced with a wave. DO you know how many
times someone will ask a question that is already been asked and the
other users will simply add them to the wave and close the current
wave. No more stupid FAQs or duplicated posts! This is the best thing
you can get for a community! (at least online ones)

> You are right when you say that  you can have " a heated discussion
> even with your close friends", but if you exclude a friend, certainly
> he will not see you as a friend too.  So in the case of closer people,
> lile family, friends, colleagues or some few people that the user
> don't know, there is not necessity of social rules or even  reject
> edits.
>
> But the question is: Wave want be more than a fantastic email, were
> conversations are organized and with a lot of tools, or want include
> also the tipe of social relation that we found in forums or social
> networks?
> Any way, if Wave is a better email that improve colaboration, in this
> case it will be necessary some rules, like reject edit, but not
> complexes rules that really are necessary for more complex social
> relations on internet, like forums and social networks.
> A social network like Facebook is in fact a lot of little communities
> of firends, family, colleagues, without a bigger objetive. In this
> case, like Wave, it is not necessary too much regularizarion.
>

the key point here is that wave is a protocol, you can build those
those on wave. In fact you should be able to restrict and model
everything on your waveserver.

> When you ask for more capacity of regularization of  more complex
> virtual community I understand your point, because I have the same
> necessity. The problem is that programmers that create forums and
> social networks in fact have a simpler idea of these communities, and
> this is teh reason because a great number of forums and communities
> don't work well in internet. The owner of a forum or a community
> dont't have the necessary tools to administrate in a good sense, i.e.,
> improving colaboration and not accepting uncooperative behavior.

> We
> have only two situations or a radical democracy where anyone do what
> he want or the administrator or moderator  can ban any member that has
> a different opinion. Both  situations can destroy the the group
> cohesion.

Just wanted to point out that your definition of "radical democracy"
is actually call anarchy. your so call "administrator or moderator" is
the waveserver owner, it's build into the protocol.

>
>  It will be better if we have more refinate tools to administrate
> conflicts in these more complex virtual communities, but I don't know
> if  Wave is the solution for this. "I don't know" here means only "I
> don't know"  ;-)

then build the tool on top of it.

> Maybe the excitement caused by Wave make people create robots or other
> tools that can help other people that want use internet for deeper
> discussion and that need this tools. But for me this is not the
> objetive of this project. For example, I can't see how integrate a
> wave in my social network, because the identity in the wave is
> different of the indentity of a member in a social network (virtual
> identities, in general social networks, are too much simple to be
> usefull in my opinion). Use a wave as a space for discussion in a
> specific social network will lose the specificity. In a case o a
> forum, no, because a forum or a group in general don't give deep
> information about people, and people can't really create an identity
> (if they want).

Well that is precisely the point, the most brilliant thing (IMO) about
the protocol is that it tiers down those barriers, there is no longer
a ML, or a forum or a wiki or a blog, it's all interconnected. And it
fixes what we have been trying to do for years, with atom,rss,email
notifications,etc.