Features/Bulletin Board

Summary
This feature provides a mechanism for (1) overlaying a multiuser chat on top of the activity canvas; (2) a place for sharing objects between users as part of group projects. See Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/Bulletin_Boards and Summer_of_Code/2014/native/Bulletin_Board for more details.

Owner

 * Name: Walter Bender and Nazrul Haque Athar

Current status

 * Targeted release: 0.102
 * Last updated: Sept 2, 2014
 * Percentage of completion: 75%

Detailed Description

 * 1) A chat overlay - It would be a spatially contextual chatting interface .It would be implemented as transparent layer over an activity where one could place annotation style chat bubbles that may be placed anywhere on the screen.This would enable discussions on specific areas in an activity and in one instance a teacher could check a child's work and place these annotations on places which need improvement.
 * 2) A persistent shareable clipboard- It would be a separate space where people working together on same projects could collaborate by sharing resources. Each activity will have it's own clipboard where participants may share supporting material that other participants in the activity may view (or keep it for themselves).There will be different views in the clipboard. For Example, the Home view would contain content that would not be shared with anyone else whereas the friends view would contain content that would be shared only with the friends.

Implementation
Much of the code has been written as part of Nazrul's GSoC project. See.

Benefit to Sugar
We think of Sugar as being a tool kit as oppose to a set of stand-alone apps. While the Journal allows interoperability between data objects within the context of a single users tools, the ability to work with a collection of objects incorporated into a group project is sorely lacking. Further, the ability to contextual chat while working collaboratively would be enormously helpful.

Scope
This feature affects the Sugar toolkit -- an extension to the activity class enable the chat overlay -- and Sugar modules to support the GUI for chat and object sharing.

UI Design
See:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3NPUTEczmU [2] https://github.com/native93/bulletinframe [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/2014/bulletinboard [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyjLfKBn4BQ (Updated video for bulletin chat)

User Experience
UX enhacement is described in the section above "Benefit to Sugar".

Dependencies
This feature does not depend on the completion of other features.

Contingency Plan
Not including.

Previous attempts
This has been part of the proposed Sugar HIG since 2007. Long overdue to land this feature.

Release Notes
To be written.

Comments and Discussion
Your comments are very welcome. Please discuss through the mailing list.