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Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Roundup: an Issue-Tracking System for Knowledge Workers


No *wonder* I like this so much.    (01)

This program was developed by Ka-Ping Yee, the primary developer
behind the Crit system. A little over a year ago, I had some conversations
with him and some of the other Crit developers at the Foresight
Institute. I laid out a lot of my thinking at the time, which seems to have
factored in some small way into his thinking.    (02)

But the fact of the matter is that we were pretty much on the same
wavelength to start with, and he has arrived at his ideas independently.
But that "common ground", is what makes me say "YeeESS" when I
heard about this.    (03)

>From http://lfw.org/ping/sc-roundup.html:
  "A typical software project requires the management of many tasks,
  usually distributed among several collaborators. In fact, any project
  team could use a tool for sorting out and discussing all the relevant
issues.
  A common approach is to set up some kind of "to-do" list that people
  can share.    (04)

  "However, to address the overall problem we need much more than just
  a shared to-do list; we need to manage a growing body of knowledge
  and experience to help a team collaborate effectively on a project. The
  issue-tracking tool becomes a nexus for communication: the Grand
  Central Station of the group intelligence.    (05)

I'm not wild about the interface, but this a tool the group should
definitely
consider using (especially if purplized), especially if there is any attempt    (06)

to actually build something.    (07)

"John J. Deneen" wrote:    (08)

> Overview and features of Roundup (), including what e-mail discussions
> should look like and Zest - an automatic outlining tool for e-mail
> discussions.
>
> "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:
>
>       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.
>
> 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. "
>
>    * 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 >
>
>    * Features
>      < http://roundup.sourceforge.net/doc-0.5/features.html >
>
>    * What e-mail discussions should look like.
>      <  http://lfw.org/ping/criticons/  >
>
>      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 >
>
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