"Public"/shared notes

[fletch3555]

Just a suggestion for some point in the future.

Have a way to share notes with everyone. This could be achieved by having a web app(google app engine or the like) that this app can ping to download all notes that have been marked "public". They can be marked public by a checkbox on the note, which triggers an upload(or queued if no network available). For bandwidth reasons, you could only load "public" notes when a match or team page is loaded, or require the user click the "refresh" button.

This will allow notes to be shared across events/people easily.

I'd be willing to put some effort into this. Obviously this is open to discussion and likely won't be implemented for this season.

[phil-lopreiato]

That's a very cool idea. Definitely a lot of work, but definitely sounds doable and useful. My first step for data collaboration (which should be easier, now that I've implemented the ability to export everything to JSON in d64cb2c) is going to be to implement the Drive Realtime API (see #19) to share all your notes with selected users in realtime.

This is definitely something to keep on the data sharing roadmap, though

[fletch3555]

The issue I see with the Drive API, and perhaps I've just misunderstood your implementation plan, is that the notes wouldn't necessarily be "public". Even if the notes were marked public, you'd have a hell of a time trying to enumerate all notes from all users. At least, unless you were planning to use the Drive API to talk to a central shared folder under an account you control, which doesn't really seem sustainable to me.

I definitely like the ability to use Drive to backup your own notes, but the central server handling all "public" notes would work better in my opinion.

[phil-lopreiato]

I think we're talking about two different use cases here. I'm thinking of a scenario where, say FTA and CSA want to keep all of their notes for a particular event synchronized between themselves (so they can communicate/effectively troubleshoot/etc). It seems to me that the drive allows you to do that kind of collaboration - multiple people editing one thing (in this case, probably a JSON representation of the database) and managing all the differences.

The way I read what you're saying is more of a "I want the world to be be able to read this note" which would have a different permission model (only the owner could edit but all could view).

I think the uses are a little different, although I haven't really looked into the specifics of what I'd have to do to implement the drive API, so I could be way off.

[fletch3555]

Well, the "everyone can view" model is what I was going for. Obviously a little more work than what you're thinking, but still doable.

[phil-lopreiato]

Agreed - I'll figure it out once I sit down to write it. Which probably won't happen until the rest of the features are mostly implemented, or at least stable

[fletch3555]

Sounds good. I definitely didn't expect this to be a high-priority feature request, so no worries. Let me know if you'd like to brainstorm when you get around to it.