[ba-unrev-talk] Roundup: an Issue-Tracking System for Knowledge Workers
Overview and features of Roundup (), including what e-mail discussions
should look like and Zest - an automatic outlining tool for e-mail
discussions. (01)
"The key strength of Roundup is that it generates a small virtual
mailing list for each new issue. In a way, this is like implementing
private conversation rooms in e-mail. Although the mechanism is very
simple, the emergent properties are quite effective. Here's how it
works: (02)
a.New issues are always submitted by sending an e-mail message.
This message is saved in
a mail spool attached to the newly-created issue record,
and copied to the relatively
large user community of the application so everyone knows
the issue has been raised.
b.All e-mail messages sent by Roundup have their "Reply-To" field
set to send mail back
to Roundup, and have the issue's ID number in the Subject
field. So, any replies to the
initial announcement and subsequent threads are all
received by Roundup and appended
to the spool.
c.Each issue has a "nosy list" of people interested in the issue.
Any mail tagged with the
issue's ID number is copied to this list of people, and
any users found in the From:, To:,
or Cc: fields of e-mail about the issue are automatically
added to the nosy list.
Whenever a user edits an item in the Web interface, they
are also added to the list. (03)
The result is that no one ever has to worry about subscribing to
anything. Indicating interest in an issue is sufficient, and if you want
to bring someone new into the conversation, all you need to do is Cc: a
message to them. It turns out that no one ever has to worry about
unsubscribing, either: the nosy lists are so specific in scope that the
conversation tends to die down by itself when the issue is resolved or
people no longer find it sufficiently important. The transparent capture
of the mail spool attached to each issue also yields a nice
searchable knowledge repository over time. " (04)
* Overview
"We propose an issue-tracking system called Roundup, which will
manage a number of issues (with properties such as "description",
"priority", and so on) and provide the ability to (a) submit new
issues, (b) find and edit existing issues, and (c) discuss issues
with other participants. The system will facilitate communication
among the participants by managing discussions and notifying
interested parties when issues are edited."
< http://lfw.org/ping/sc-roundup.html > (05)
* Features
< http://roundup.sourceforge.net/doc-0.5/features.html > (06)
* What e-mail discussions should look like.
< http://lfw.org/ping/criticons/ > (07)
April 2002 Proposal
* Zest: An Automatic Outlining Tool for E-mail Discussions
< http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~ping/vertex-2002/zest.html >
< http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~ping/vertex-2002/zest.pdf > (08)
-------------------------------------------
Introducing NetZero Long Distance
Unlimited Long Distance only $29.95/ month!
Sign Up Today! www.netzerolongdistance.com (09)