Loomio

Seeing that someone else is commenting at the same time

Olover PublicSeen by 67

It would be useful to know if someone else is typing a comment at the same time as you are, so that you have the option to wait until the other person is done before writing your comment.

I am not sure if this would overlap with a chat feature or not. I do think it's valuable to have the conversation (if it becomes one) recorded for others to refer to later, such as it currently is in the discussion thread, but perhaps a real-time conversation should be nested differently in the thread?

The question I am raising is simply that of also allowing for simultaneous discussions rather than only the time-delayed discussions that the current thread design seems to account for.

James Kiesel

Yes, live comment updating is 100% happening in the new interface.

One of the things we noticed while developing the 1.0 interface is that with the real time updating, discussions feel a lot more like chat than forum. I personally am a little torn on this idea; internet chat rooms are the worst places for decision making ever to grace our green planet, and it takes some time to tap out a well-reasoned, informed opinion. And I think it may make Loomio less scalable if we try to support such a feature (we are, after all, aiming for thousands of people at a time to deliberate on this thing eventually; maybe we turn it off for discussions including more than a few dozen people or something).

All that being said, I think this feature probably will end up in Loomio 1.0 in some form.

Olover

Yes, I see both the potential for low-quality decision-making if it's chat-room style as well as the issue of number. I just think it should be an option for those who happen to be online at the same time.

Maybe something on the side for chatting, and at the end of the chat one of the two people can write a summary comment in the discussion thread?

In any case, having thousands of people contribute to a discussion thread seems impractical given the current structure anyway... I don't see an alternative right now, but I do think it gets overwhelming to try to read through a long thread of comments. Real-time conversation, if anything, would help reduce that by condensing outcomes of micro-conversations.

So here's another idea: having a "live conversation" space for every discussion, which would function like a chatroom to filter through some ideas, on the discussion page (maybe in the lower right-hand side); and having the discussion thread on the left, which would be to mark the more general evolution of discussion and thought on the subject (at the end of the chat, users could be prompted to write a short summary of the outcome of the conversation for the discussion thread). And, as is the case now, once an idea with potential comes up, a proposal is created.

Another point is that it would be also useful to simply be able to tell when someone else is typing a comment, as is the case with iMessage or WhatsApp.