(In the process of getting involved, and wondering what you need to do next? I’ve now put everything under the AGITTOC 2020 tab up top.)
Hi everyone,
Here is an update. I am still gunning for this Saturday (June 20) for the first lecture, and it looks within reach. I may as well give some details. The shepherds (field marshals) are mostly in place. Still to go:
I hope with 24 hours of now to have decided whether to use Coauthor or Zulip (or just discord!) for working groups and groupoids. (Please try zulipchat.com — it is free — and give opinions, and ditto for coauthor except that you probably can’t try it out yourself.) I want to hear what the shepherds think, and I’ve just asked them (and they are also trying out Coauthor). (Thanks to David Roe, who is part of the brains behind research seminars.org, for zulip talk.)
I’m done processing any new submissions of the first form for a bit, and will get back to that only when things stabilize after the first lecture. (But if you are just signing up now, don’t worry.) I’ll finish collecting new submissions of the second questionnaire (2 multiple choice questions) tomorrow.
I need to continue making working groups (the parts that are left require the answers to the 2nd form), and that is the single thing I’m unsure about.
I need to finish the first lecture, including sorting out technology, but that seems doable (thanks here to Dev Sinha at Oregon for advice on the video part, and Yufei Zhao at MIT for advice on notability and hopefully having past slides immediately available during the talk).
So now I will call it a night, and get back to work on this tomorrow morning!
Math 216: Foundations of Algebraic Geometry 
June 16, 2020 at 7:25 am
A quick review of Coauthor:
* A user can be a member of n groups (corresponding to a “groupoid”), or all groups, or have superuser roles.
* All members of a group are listed below every thread, along with superusers who have access to it.
* Message board style hierarchical threads, with clickable list of replies on the right displaying user/reply-title/hierarchy.
* Tags (indicating topic) can be instantly created and added. Clicking on a tag shows all posts/replies with that tag.
* Live preview pane and live editing visible to others – intended for collaboration.
* Choose between a super-collaborative mode where anybody can edit anybody’s post, more typical permissions, or something in between.
* Look and feel: dark and light themes, optional vim/emacs keybindings.
* Notifications appear to be by email only, but there is an option to catch up with new messages since any specified time.
Zulip improves on Discord by simply adding a “topic” layer under each channel. So, it seems to be a “chat” interface, as opposed to the “message board” interface of Coauthor. But you can think of topics as new posts, when it is very much a “message board” system. See further: https://zulipchat.com/help/about-streams-and-topics. It is designed to feel as much like Discord/Slack as possible.
Other options: Discord and Slack are very similar, and are familiar to most people. Latex support is through a bot. Gitter is also interesting. You can visit one of their many public communities to see how it works. Multiple private rooms can be created within each community, and longer discussions go as “issues” on GitHub. Let’s not forget old workhorses like Moodle, Piazza, etc. And there do exist free hosted wikis, e.g. myxwiki.org. Almost everything seems to have Latex support these days.
June 19, 2020 at 5:28 pm
Thanks! That is a really good summary of both. I am constantly surprised to find out which groups of people are familiar, and unfamiliar, with discord, and separately with slack.
We’ll use zulip because of the potential advantages you mentioned. (It also has videoconferencing.) And discord is available too, and can be used simultaneously. Although at this point coauthor is not on the regular menu, I am quite taken with it, and should emphasize that it isn’t trumped by zulip — I think coauthor and zulip are tuned for different uses. I’m expecting to use coauthor myself. I’m tempted to offer to let AGITTOC participants onto the Coauthor instance that Siddharth Mahendraker set up, so you can see for yourselves, but not just yet, as I should not get distracted from getting the AGITTOC experiment up and running. (I’m not sure how universal the phrase “Rube Goldberg machine” is… it may be a particularly culturally specific reference, but there must be analogous phrases in many languages.)
June 16, 2020 at 9:36 am
Do we need to read anything before the first lecture (perhaps new version of Rising Sea?)? Since the community is so large, I couldn’t imagine what the lecture will be like.
June 19, 2020 at 5:22 pm
I also can’t imagine what the first lecture will be like! No need necessarily to read anything, as I want to try to set the stage (given the breadth). But you can read as much of the chapter on category theory as you are able to without rushing. And as I’ll emphasize, it is far better to think about the exercises and not get very far at all than to quickly read for general ideas.