I was in for a bit last night and enjoyed it. On the one hand, I think it did help me keep working where I otherwise would’ve quit or wasted more time on Internet distractions. That said, the chat, while interesting, was distracting from the primary purpose of the chat room.
There should definitely be two separate rooms—one for general chat and one for paired working. But the shared Pomodoro timing is also a good idea and should be tried, in my opinion.
Also, we should find a different chat client than Tinychat. It’s log in process and text limitations are very annoying.
A few of us have been experimenting with other clients and have not found anything better. Logging into Google Hangout is more of a pain than tinychat, among other downsides. We’re thinking that having a bot to announce pomodoros on tinychat might be the best solution we have so far, given the current options.
If you know anyone who might be up for coding one or if you have better ideas, I’d love to hear!
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I’m not sure if I’d be the best person to actually make something like this, but I’ll share the design requirements that I’ve come up with so far.
The framework that I’m basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of each room, each person should be able to choose whether to broadcast video or not. There will probably be a ~10 person cap on how many can broadcast inside of a single room, but there should be a much higher cap on how many can watch. There should also be text and possibly voice only chat features.
Each room should have an optionally enabled feature set, currently only including the ability to set up synced pomodoros. This feature should probably change the look of the room while it is in the 25 minutes, and then change it to “break room” look while in the 5 minutes. There could be a toggle to optionally mute everyone during the working time.
Rooms should preferably be dynamically allocate-able. At the very least, it should not be nightmarish to add new rooms.
The login/user management should not be nightmarish. Possibly password protected access, and disseminate the password as widely as possible here on LW?
The whole thing should be web based, with no client side software.
Does anyone else have any design requirements that they would like to add?
edit: further googling has uncovered OpenMeetings, which might be just the things needed to build this out.
Right now I’m trying to get a sense of what is needed technically for the features that the people most dedicated to this are most interested in, and then I’m going to write up a post to Discussion about it.
I was in for a bit last night and enjoyed it. On the one hand, I think it did help me keep working where I otherwise would’ve quit or wasted more time on Internet distractions. That said, the chat, while interesting, was distracting from the primary purpose of the chat room.
There should definitely be two separate rooms—one for general chat and one for paired working. But the shared Pomodoro timing is also a good idea and should be tried, in my opinion.
Also, we should find a different chat client than Tinychat. It’s log in process and text limitations are very annoying.
A few of us have been experimenting with other clients and have not found anything better. Logging into Google Hangout is more of a pain than tinychat, among other downsides. We’re thinking that having a bot to announce pomodoros on tinychat might be the best solution we have so far, given the current options.
If you know anyone who might be up for coding one or if you have better ideas, I’d love to hear!
I actually started thinking about how to create something that would work for this as soon as I started reading the comments about the Pomodoro feature. I’m not sure if I’d be the best person to actually make something like this, but I’ll share the design requirements that I’ve come up with so far.
The framework that I’m basing this off of is something like TeamSpeak or Mumble, where there are a hierarchical tree of rooms with people in them. There should probably be an accessible tree view that shows all rooms along with all current occupants.
Inside of each room, each person should be able to choose whether to broadcast video or not. There will probably be a ~10 person cap on how many can broadcast inside of a single room, but there should be a much higher cap on how many can watch. There should also be text and possibly voice only chat features.
Each room should have an optionally enabled feature set, currently only including the ability to set up synced pomodoros. This feature should probably change the look of the room while it is in the 25 minutes, and then change it to “break room” look while in the 5 minutes. There could be a toggle to optionally mute everyone during the working time.
Rooms should preferably be dynamically allocate-able. At the very least, it should not be nightmarish to add new rooms.
The login/user management should not be nightmarish. Possibly password protected access, and disseminate the password as widely as possible here on LW?
The whole thing should be web based, with no client side software.
Does anyone else have any design requirements that they would like to add?
edit: further googling has uncovered OpenMeetings, which might be just the things needed to build this out.
Yes, you are thinking along the same lines a bunch of others of us are. Message me your email and I’ll add you to the discussion.
Right now I’m trying to get a sense of what is needed technically for the features that the people most dedicated to this are most interested in, and then I’m going to write up a post to Discussion about it.
Yes, we’re working on it.