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The Collaboration Tree (cTree) is a new web technology aimed at facilitating more productive discussions around a specific topic, usually a goal or problem to solve. Initially the goal is to help nonprofits communicate more effectively with their communities, but the potential uses stretch far beyond that. Other community based web technologies like forums and wikis can be used at small scales, but are less useful for larger topics or groups. Collaboration Trees will allow the quick interactions most users are accustomed to, while maximizing the usefulness of their interaction and organizing the larger discussion.

With Collaboration Trees, all points are tied together, and by default can all be traced back to a core point, like a specific topic or problem to solve. Each point can be updated and improved by the community, similar to a wiki, but unlike most wikis, the highest rated version wins and is shown by default. Alternate versions are easily available and can be individually discussed and rated. The type of data in each point is pluggable, with initial defaults of text and images. Feedback with supporting content like quotes or links to supporting information are ranked higher by default.

Eventually the project will leverage AI to intelligently suggest things for users to interact with that interest them, match their stated and observed strengths, and can have a meaningful impact on the discussion. For example, users who often provide useful feedback on new ideas may be more likely to see a new idea nobody has given feedback on. Another example would be if a user tends to rate things in a way that matches most other users or users of a specific group, their ratings would be more valuable and they'd be more likely to see something which hasn't been rated before it's potentially shown to other users.

While the project is open source and can be integrated into any website, the goal is to also create a hub site where all public cTrees can be found. This will help with discovery as well as evangelize the use of the technology both on the hub site and on unaffiliated sites. At its peak, the largest cTrees will likely develop their own sub-communities with their own input plugin sets.

This specific project holds the officialy supported Collaboration Tree backend.

The technology is based on NGINX as proxy server, NaviServer as webserver, TCL-TK and Python3 as programing languages, PostgreSQL as database manager system and PSQL as SQL language script.

Copyright (c) 2020 Foundation For an Innovative Future (InnovativeFuture.org)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

Foundation For an Innovative Future reserves the right to release the covered work, in part or in whole, under a different open source license and/or with specific copyleft exclusions. Such a release would not invalidate the license for this project, although the project released with a modified license would not be considered part of this covered work or subject to the copyleft portions of this license even if the projects are identical.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Please email contact@innovativeFuture.org for inquiries related to this license.

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The preferred method of communication for the community is our Slack group. There are also regular events held in Los Angeles, CA and online to encourage contributors to set aside time to work on the project. If you're interested in starting events in your area please email contact@innovativeFuture.org. There are also Facebbok and Twitter sites where you can keep up with the project, as well as a LinkedIn organization you can list on your profile if you're a regular contributor.

Because of the size of the project, issues are broken down into teams. Contributors looking to bolster their resume may find it more useful to pick a team to work with so they can point to that specific work rather than specific changes or the project as a whole, though there's no requirement to work on issues for a single team. The current teams are:

This team is responsible for implementing the database to hold and access all user and collaboration tree data. For the alpha version this means duplicating the randomly generated data structures and interfaces and backing them with a real online database. This is a high priority part of the project, required before we can start alpha testing.

This team is responsible for implementing the new landing page shown to users when first opening the site. It's a way to introduce the technology to people who aren't familiar with it and help them get started with the site. This is a high priority part of the project, required before we can start alpha testing.

One of the core ideas behind Collaboration Trees is that contributors can quickly contribute by skimming suggested posts. This makes reviewing the most popular posts and overall structure of the tree more difficult for anyone trying to watch the progress of the tree or check for an answer if a question or problem was used as the seed for the tree. This team is responsible for creating and integrating different visualizations of the overall data. This will aid alpha testing, but is not yet a requirement before it begins.

Posts are the individual pieces which make up all Collaboration Trees, similar to comments in a forum or pages on a wiki. Because of this, posts require more work, which has been divided into sub-teams.

This team is responsible for implementing everything required to create new posts, whether they're the first post for a new Collaboration Tree, a new post related to another post, or a new post which needs to be linked to another post. This also includes the important task of looking for other existing posts which may be similar and suggesting them to the user to try and reduce duplicates. Because this is required for building cTrees, the core functionality is required before we can start alpha testing.

This team is responsible for the core details screen of the post dialog. The core functionality is already implemented, but can be improved to be more intuitive. This team is also responsible for adding additional types of input for posts via the pluggable structure.

Feedback is a core component for Collaboration Trees, being supported for each post variation as well as each variation of each piece of an post. This team is responsible for making the post dialog's feedback screen fully functional, including listing, sorting, and adding feedback. One unique feature of cTree comments is that supporting data, like images, quotes, or studies, is encouraged by increasing their visibility when included. This team is also responsible for the up/down vote functionality supported both on the feedback screen and details screen of the post dialog.

Posts list a summary of top contributors on their preview and details screen, which takes the user to a summary of all contributors and their contributions to the post. This team is responsible for both the summary and page listing all contributors.

This team is responsible for the dialog listing information for and about users. The dialog will contain information to allow users to review a summary of their contributions as well as update their public and private account information. This team will not be responsible for implementing the temporary accounts used for alpha testing, but may build on it to implement the dialog.

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