Hi everyone,
The plan to not start tomorrow remains. I am now still hopeful (although not completely optimistic) that Saturday June 6 will be the start.
Some updates:
Each working group will have a channel on discord that will be its own. But even before that’s set up (and the groups are set), I’ll start getting invites to the Algebraic Geometry Syndicate discord server out to you. I’m sorting things out with the moderators, but tentatively I’d send the invites out over a number of days, in moderate-sized chunks, in order to not flood the server all at once. I’ll let everyone know (by a later post) when that is all done. So no need to email me to ask if it’s happened already, and if you’d missed out.
I’ll continue to in general not reply to AGITTOC-related email, not because it is overwhelming (yet) but because I don’t want it to become overwhelming later.
Now that the groups are coming together, I’ve asked some people I’ve already worked with in different ways about being field marshals.
I’m slowly making my way through the survey responses (the pseudo-registrations). This remains the scariest thing for me — individually, they are interesting to read. Reading too many at once hurts my head.
One intriguing possibility is to for us to use Coauthor, some neat software created by Erik Demaine — see here for more about it. It might be a good place for working groups to talk together. I’m going to play with it, and maybe later see if this is even possible to use for AGITTOC. Thanks very much to Leo Alcock for making this connection. (Feel free to comment below on opinions.)
Once again, the various technologies now looking likely to be used: wordpress (this site); my webpage (to share the notes, as some people are blocked from wordpress); zoom (for the pseudo-lectures); youtube (to post videos — they would also be on zoom, so hopefully everyone can access at least one); discord (for group conversations); possibly Coauthor (maybe instead of discord, or as well) for working groups; possibly dropbox for working groups to share their problem sets (although probably it’s easier for people to just share them on discord).
(Added later: also, please feel free to register even now — every so often I move recent additions into the big google spreadsheet.)
Math 216: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry 
May 29, 2020 at 9:15 pm
Sir,I’m sure that I have filled out the Google form.(Actually,I try to filled it out twice).But I still don’t get a e-mail.Is there something wrong?
June 2, 2020 at 5:09 am
I’m pretty sure the emails haven’t been sent out yet (I haven’t recieved one either). He says in this post he’s only going to start getting the groups out to us now so I wouldn’t worry, it’ll take some time! 🙂
May 29, 2020 at 9:39 pm
Sir,I certainly have filled out the Google form(Actually,I filled it out twice)But I still don’t get an e-mail.Is there something wrong?
May 30, 2020 at 8:32 am
Hello, if I can help you in any way to put people in groups, I will be happy to do that.
May 30, 2020 at 11:23 pm
Thanks! I may take you up on that. It’s going slowly but surely. I like being able to see things about the participants directly, when figuring out how to place people. Especially since placements aren’t going to be perfect, I can at least see what I’m trying to do. But perhaps at this scale I shouldn’t be doing this — it’s not so huge that I think of it as impossible, but bigger than I’d anticipated. I’m of course doing the easiest parts first.
(Also, discord invitations have started to go out in a somewhat random order, and will continue to go out over the next week, so if anything goes wrong with the server being flooded, we can figure it out. Thanks in particular here to the moderators on the server, who are doing this out of their own goodwill!)
May 30, 2020 at 3:53 pm
hackmd, onenote are other working group collaboration options
May 30, 2020 at 11:04 pm
Thanks! I took a brief glance. The main issues are latex and price. Price because basically everything has to be free. (Another possible absolute necessity, which both of your suggestions satisfy, is that it must be trivial to use out of the box.)
OneNote I like (and use myself). Seems less good for threaded discussions. (I find googledocs seems to trump OneNote for ease of collaboration — but it sounds like you have a different opinion.)
hackmd actually looks very cool. I’m going to remember its name. I didn’t look closely at latex support, because given the scale of this, the cost is prohibitive. (Actually, anything more than $0 is prohibitive, although I could imagine it being reasonable for me to just pay out of pocket for something small.)
One thing groups can do is to use a different medium to chat anyway. But for heterogeneous groups (those who didn’t all know each other in advance), moving to something else might lose people.
May 30, 2020 at 11:19 pm
Actually, I see that hackmd is free in a way that still might be workable for large number of people. Still currently feels trumped by discord and coauthor to me, but still also very much on my radar screen.
May 30, 2020 at 10:49 pm
I appreciate that you are opened comments before making final decisions. I think coauthor is a better choice. Features like sorting, threaded message organization, tags etc make it more useful for this project. On the other hand, discord has many privacy issues.
May 30, 2020 at 11:18 pm
Indeed!
One of the benefits of us all undertaking this experiment is that we can try to figure out what works well to do things in new ways (at least, new at these scales).
The current potential issues with coauthor:
We are using it at a scale at which I think it has never been used. If we used it hosted by Erik Demaine at MIT, this would impose real costs on him in terms of maintenance, so I’d have to talk with him, also with Leo Alcock, to figure out if this could work (and if so, how soon).
Another possibility would be to have a separably maintained instance of it (because Erik, being on the side of all that is good, made it open source). This would require one of you to set it up an maintain it, in a way that we could all have confidence that it would be robust and stable and not go down in flames at some point.
One mild advantage of discord is that it working groups can talk in private (but field marshals can come in to chat). In coauthor, if we work on one instance of it, then everyone can see everything. Not tragic — we just have to be civilized human beings. If things end up living on Erik Demaine’s server, then we would not want to both him at all (with any maintenance), and would want to just have one instance. If we’re working on our own server, then we could have many instances. Still having one per working group is too much to maintain (given the number of working groups!). But we could have one per ~100 people…
May 31, 2020 at 12:57 am
It is easy (5 mins. to 2 hours) to set up a single new instance of coauthor or similar software. This sort of thing is usually ready to run, and doesn’t need customization. You need only one instance, and you can add groups as you originally intended:
>Messages are organized by groups (intended to correspond to groups of people who meet) … Permissions can be specified for each user at the group level (typical case — user can access the entire group of messages), at the thread level (user can access only certain threads within group), or at the global level.
Things will go wrong by Murphy’s law, and a lot of unexpected situations will arise because we haven’t tried out this system beforehand. The worst situations can be avoided because we have multiple scheduled daily backups:
>All of Coauthor’s data (including messages, history, and file uploads) is stored in the Mongo database (which is part of Meteor). You probably want to do regular (e.g. daily) dump backups. There’s a script in .backup that I use to dump the database, copy to the development machine, and upload to Dropbox or other cloud storage via rclone.
On top of this, you can advise people to keep a copy of their own important files – a sort of caveman backup. (And, finding people to blame works a lot better than fixing things.)
The maintainer will be delighted to help as much as needed, but you can’t ask him to do all the work. Scale isn’t a problem, but it is a new, not highly tested software.
Coauthor can’t be worse than Moodle and other ubiquitously used software. I imagine there should be dozens of of collaboration software with partial or full latex support. Wikipedia’s own MediaWiki is another example. Deploying software is never without its hassles, but people do it all the time. Go with your feelings.
June 2, 2020 at 3:05 pm
Thank you Anand! I’ve just played with coauthor for a few minutes, and it looks potentially well-suited to this (and to other things).
It looks like you’re not quite offering to set it up and be a primary maintainer yourself — but if you might, please let me know. I think for AGITTOC we would want ~20 instances, each of which would host ~10 groups. It is not clear to me how much maintenance is required after the initial set-up, other than dealing with people wanting accounts (which presumably can be delegated).
June 3, 2020 at 12:08 am
Yes, I can help setup/maintain the system. I don’t have a server, but if you have a server with at least 2 GB disk space and memory free, we can do this. It is safe to try out – root access is not required for most things, and the whole software directory can simply be deleted if required.
The multiple instances idea (whether on the same server or on multiple servers) is difficult and unnecessary. I think there should be sufficiently fine control over group permissions to achieve whatever you intended. An alternative to bulk-adding accounts is to let people create their account on their own and then have a moderator give them the group permissions, exactly like on discord.
I am not saying I am the best person for this job. You can find a lot of other technical people if you just ask around, e.g. on discord.