We’ve been working with Outlines in the past 2 weeks. We have ready a Personal Outline Viewer (in a browser). This allows users in a company to create their own outlines, and edit the top-level nodes independently. Its a very simplified tool, but it works. Next step: to makes Outline nodes shareable with others in the company. This should be done shortly.
After this, I’ve been thinking of two possible paths: one, to make Outlines “Instant” (notifies others of updates) and Group Outlines (where multiple people can update/post to an outline), or to work on Weblogs (K-Logs) for narrating work. Earlier, I was inclined to go through the Outlines in greater depth. But now I think, it will be better to do the Blogs part next.
Not all people think in Outlines — publishing an outline doesnt come naturally. Where an Outline is very good is for hierarchically representing thinking and ideas, like a Table of Contents. Weblogs, however, can be used by everyone. Its about regular narration of what they are doing. What is needed is to make Weblogs publish RSS feeds which can be (a) visible to others, as decided by the author and (b) posted directly to create a community blog.
So, using the mix of Outlines, Blogs and RSS, we can create a nice read-write environment — one which allows people to make their daily notes, as well as create in-depth outlines on specific topics/projects. We want to use these building blocks together in our company to create a new collarborative environment, which will work on Thin Clients.
