User Experience/Grand Concept

THE GRAND VISION

A Radical New Approach to Content Creation and Management

Intro

I have a vision, but unfortunately, like any radical vision, it implies major changes in many different areas.

The increasing prevalence of Internet and Net technologies imply a major shift in content creation. Unfortunately, current “classical” content formats do not keep pace with these new developments.

These older formats were designed for printing on paper, not to view and edit on the net. They were appropriate for the last 500 years, but they miss the point in the 21st century. When we talk, we are dynamic. Sometimes we argue with ourselves, alone, in a monologue, but most often people dialogue with each other. The visuals are important, too. Yet, these old documents do not have any dynamic content, because, obviously, the paper cannot support something that is dynamic.

But paper is relentlessly supplanted with online content, be it wikis, blogs or forums or any other eDocument type. Completely new document formats are emerging: just consider YouTube and its tremendous success. The future will be a rich one and a very dynamic one.

I will begin this discussion with some specific points about the existing OOo modules and, in the end, list some requirements needed to meet these future goals. Unfortunately, because the future is so dynamic, the single most important requirement, implies refactoring OOo in a way that will allow easily improving/adapting/developing/EXTENDING OOo. A slim, modularized OOo will allow this. A monolith will be a block in future development.

Writer

The greatest shift in content creation takes place in the classical text-documents. It is this that will have the greatest impact in the future. Pure text - by definition static - has evolved to something dynamic. There is no correspondence in the classical documents for this new type.

Greater Net Interactivity

• more people write in blogs, wikis and forums than they write documents (by a margin of probably more than 10:1; tendency increasing)
• ability to export directly to these formats (MediaWiki extension is the right thing, but needs much improvement)
• ability to synchronize local documents with remote / net based documents (e.g. Wikis; not just export, but import back, as a wiki might have been changed by someone else)

Dynamic Content

• the new technologies make the old document formats look like carvings from the stone age
• one of the major drawbacks of these old formats is the very limited dynamic functionality
• the net technologies (like js/java) are much more dynamic, and new ones (like the Lively Kernel) will become even more so in the future
• audio/video-capabilities in OOo and ODF are virtually non-existent
  • there are more viewers on YouTube daily than probably downloads of all ODF-compatible programs in one month
  • some videoclips on YouTube have more than 10,000,000 views; tendency increasing

These net technologies open avenues for content development that exceed our imagination. The world is in a revolution, and rather in a big one. In 1-2 years we will see document types that we haven't even thought about today. I am rather sure about this development. Of course, you can't print a video on paper, but this misses the point. The world has become wired, and documents will evolve to fill this gap.

The problem with the current OOo design is its monolithic structure. It has to become more flexible. New modules need to be integrated more readily, and, more importantly, it has to become easier to develop new modules. Documents will evolve fast, so you need a slim modularized architecture to keep pace with the development.

Should OOo include audio/video-editing capabilities?

My point was always to reuse existing software, especially when free and very good alternatives exist. It is likely that there won't be enough resources to do it from scratch anyway. However, both ODF and OOo have to prepare to integrate such features in the shortest time possible. YouTube doesn't wait. Please also take into consideration, that future document types might evolve to something very different we envisaged today. OOo (and ODF) must be able to adapt fast. Only those who adapt fast will survive. Take the scissors now, not later. Later might be too late.