Tings have been the council gatherings of the old vikings and germanians. Tings now are real-time online gatherings using a collaborative-editor.

On a ting you edit a document simultaneously with others. You can write in a collab-editor freely just like on a wiki-page. There is a perfect history of how a document grows.

See:

A ting for wikimania using MoonEdit is set up on s23-wiki: wikimania-ting. Yes, there is a working extention to transclude text from a session into a mediawiki page.

But far more interesting than MoonEdit is the open source and cross-platform gobby. Version 0.2.0 was just released and supports a standalone server now.

Getting a wikimania-ting on gobby rolling would be way cool.

The collab-editor progress makes article-tings (or topic-tings?) imagineable for wikipedia. This has the potential to increase the working speed enormously. Tinging is highly productive, great fun and it makes people reappoint and go on.

Imagineable is a list of wikipedia's real-time editing sessions: You take a look what is going on today:

  • 22:00, Astronomy in Danish, - Danish wikipedians meet to improve the Astronomy related articles in the dk.wikipedia
  • 22:30 Psychology in Chinese
  • 22:45 German railway-geeks meet
  • ...

- 24/7 Tings.

People/groups:

the gobby-devs (on jabber) phil@0x539.de + armin@0x539.de

A standalone server for testing gobby is set up on is-root.de.

To test it:

  • Install gobby. See the gobby-wiki: installation guide.
  • Open gobby, click join session, enter is-root.de, your nick, choose a colour, ok (welcome to collab-editing).
  • Make sure someone else joins it in case you are alone, as alone it's no fun/just like wiki (only faster/more wiki). Ting 43 is on thursday August 11th, see the ting-wiki.