[tahoe-dev] [tahoe-lafs] #1281: implement a notification mechanism, e.g. for accounting messages

[tahoe-lafs]

#1281: implement a notification mechanism, e.g. for accounting messages
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     Reporter:  davidsarah   |       Owner:  somebody                  
         Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new                       
     Priority:  major        |   Milestone:  undecided                 
    Component:  code         |     Version:  1.8.1                     
   Resolution:               |    Keywords:  notification extensibility
Launchpad Bug:               |  
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Comment (by warner):

 Hm. I like the idea of using existing channels, but we should be careful
 to
 retain the main Ostrom principle: all participants should be confident
 that
 everybody is seeing these messages, so that everyone feels like they're
 participating. And we should think about the way the messages are
 presented
 too: they should lead the grid members to feel like they're part of a
 club,
 or all sitting in the same room, making decisions about a common resource.
 It's a subtle social thing, and I don't know what's best to do, but we
 need
 to think about perception and "voice" or "register" (as used in Danny
 O'Brien's [http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2003/10/13 essay on secrecy])
 and
 the sense of "the medium is the message", in addition to the strictly
 technical aspects.

 I wonder if highly outward-facing channels (like Twitter or Facebook)
 might
 work against this. If you know that all the messages you type into your
 tahoe
 grid channel show up on a twitter feed, and external non-members start
 commenting on them, you'll start to think of that external world as your
 audience, which may interfere with the real purpose of the channel (to
 manage
 the scare common resource of the grid).

 You kind of want something closely tied to your use of the grid. If Tahoe
 had
 a regular GUI application, like a file browser or a place to drag-and-drop
 uploads into, you'd want it to appear in a corner of that window, like a
 built-in chat room (which I seem to recall was a feature of Mnet). So that
 every time you use Tahoe, you see the effects of your use in this channel,
 and by seeing everyone else's effects in the channel, you get conditioned
 to
 think about your co-grid-managers seeing your effects, and thinking things
 like "huh, I wonder if anyone will be upset if I upload this 500GB file"
 and
 *knowing* the people that could be impacted by that.

 But we don't have a GUI app like that, or at least there are lots of ways
 to
 do things to the grid that don't go through a single tool, so we need some
 other ideas. Having something on the wui Welcome page is a start, but
 that's
 not where most people "hang out" when using the WUI. Maybe adding
 something
 to the corner of each directory page might help raise visibility, but I'm
 not
 sure I like the idea of making those pages so.. dynamic. Maybe we need to
 find a way to make the Welcome page more "sticky".. add enough interesting
 and fast-changing data that people will tend to leave it open a lot.

 Ooh! I know, let's add that platform-shooter "try to destroy the shares
 before the evil Repairer replaces them for you" game we always talked
 about,
 to the Welcome page. That'd be awesome :).

 So anyways, yeah, if there is an external broadcast technology that all
 members of the grid can agree upon *and will associate with their use of
 the grid*,
 then that may be a lot more effective than some extra text on a web page
 that
 nobody looks at anyways. But it's got to be "emotionally connected" to the
 grid somehow.

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1281#comment:2>
tahoe-lafs <http://tahoe-lafs.org>
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