Collaborating on a memo

[aaronpowell]

I'm starting to use Memo in my homelab in conjunction with an AI agent. The workflow I have is that I have the agent write to Memo when we've been collaborating on something so that it's preserved and later on it can be edited via the Memo interface.

Because I don't want the AI to impersonate me (it represents a role managing our household), I created it its own Memo account and when it creates Memos they are added to the appropriate Space for us to use.

While this works fine, it falls down if I want to edit the Memo - while I can read it in the Space, I can't update it.

This isn't an AI-specific problem, I sometimes want to share a Memo with my partner and they can make changes to it.

Unless I've missed something in the permissions model, there seems to be no way to share a Memo with edit permissions. Am I missing something, or could this be considered a feature request?

[boojack]

Hi @aaronpowell, thanks for the detailed write-up, and the AI agent as its own household account is a neat setup.

You're not missing anything. Today, Memos only lets the original author edit a memo. Sharing a memo into a space makes it visible to other members, but editing is still limited to the creator. There's no way to grant edit permission to anyone else yet.

I think this is a genuinely useful feature, and your two examples (an agent account creating memos you later refine, and sharing a memo with a partner) are exactly the kind of cases where it would help. We'd be happy to consider it.

Before we design anything, I'd love to hear how you picture it working. A few directions come to mind, and it would help to know which fits your workflow best:

• Link-based editing, similar to Google Docs: anyone with the link (or anyone in the space) can edit.
• Explicit collaborators: the author picks specific users who can edit that memo.
• Space-level roles: members of a space with an admin role can edit any memo shared into it.
• Something else entirely, or a mix of the above.

A couple of follow-up questions that would shape the design:

• Should collaborators be able to do everything the author can (edit content, change visibility, delete), or just edit content?
• Would you want a visible history of who changed what, or is that not important for your use case?

Happy to keep the conversation going here, and thanks again for raising it.

[aaronpowell]

Thinking about it from a MVP perspective, I would focus on having it a feature of Spaces and done in a way that it is an opt in when sharing to a Space. The current "add to Space" permission model adds the memo as a read-only memo to the Space, and then there is a new "visibility" level of "Space - Editable" which then makes the item editable to anyone who has access to the Space.

In my mind, this seems the most logical - Link-based editing has a discoverability problem because I have to explicitly share things each time, maybe fine for once-off scenarios but in a collaborative environment (household/team/etc.) having to keep sharing links would be overhead.

Explicit collaborators would be a very workable solution too, but I think you can achieve what you would want from that by leveraging Spaces as the collaboration boundary, rather than introducing something new as an in-addition-to design.

A couple of follow-up questions that would shape the design:

• Should collaborators be able to do everything the author can (edit content, change visibility, delete), or just edit content?

I don't think someone who has the permission to edit someone else's memo should be able to change visibility, that would seem like an overly destructive action that they can take, same with deleting, but they should be able to edit content, add attachments, etc.

• Would you want a visible history of who changed what, or is that not important for your use case?

Given that there currently isn't an audit trail feature, at least not that I've seen, I wouldn't consider it a requirement for an MVP. I think there is value in the idea of an audit trail as a general feature though, even so you can view the history of your own edits, perform rollbacks, etc., but I would consider that an independent feature to collaboration. Yes, that does mean you have some opacity in the collaboration outcomes, but it's where you'd rely on a bit of trust that the person you are sharing with isn't going to be destructive.

[aaronpowell]

@boojack what do you think of this design? I can get started on it and get a draft up for review

[boojack]

@aaronpowell we're working through the collaboration design. A few thoughts:

• Instance admins could update any memo. That's expected behavior today.
• A Space is an optional container for memos. We don't want Space membership to determine a memo's permissions.
• We're looking at Google Docs and Notion as references for per-memo read-only and read-and-write access.

Your household and agent workflow is a useful case for this design. So I'd hold off on implementing a new visibility "Space - Editable" while we work through the per-memo permission model.