Meetings & Chat ideas

[joepio]

Productivity tools like notion tend to miss a core productivity feature: group chats. Chat tools like discord tend to miss important productivity features like collab documents and todos. In Atomic, we have a bunch of powerful productivity features (documents, tables, live editing) AND we have group chats. But the group chats still miss some magic to make it really feel like a useful tool for this:

• Current topic. This is an idea I've been playing around with for a long time. In meetings, you tend to discuss a single, specific thing. You maybe have your meeting notes, but maybe you're talking about a specific todo, or an event. It would be great if everyone would then be looking at that thing. Typically we solve this with a desktop feed, but this is not interactive. I think a simple solution is to set a current topic in the Chat instance, which is a link to some Atomic resource. This is then shown to all in the chat. To prevent losing focus unexpectedly, they can turn off auto-follow, and move back to previous topics.
• Video calls. Of course we should not try to implement this in our own server, but maybe we could use something external like jitsi?

I have some doubts on our current implementation, though. We now have ClassExtender for ChatRooms that pushes a Chat Message when a child has the chatroom as its parent (I think). I'm not sure if this scales well, but maybe its fine.