Make any text input collaborative

This is a common workflow for collaboratively writing task/story descriptions in JIRA

• The team wants to fill in the details
• Person A starts sharing their screen
• Group discussion begins
• As details are ironed out, someone, let’s call them Person B, will want Person A to write down what they’re saying
• Person C comes up with a refinement. They will now ask Person A to change the wording
• Ad infinitum

There are many parallel streams of thought that are being aggregated by a single collector. This slows everyone down unnecessarily because the collector can only deal with a single stream of thought at any given time.

One solution is to ask Atlassian to make the JIRA description field support real-time collaboration, but that will likely never happen. Another solution is to Do It Yourself.

• Given any text input on a page, a user can click on a Chrome extension to make it collaborative
• The extension will get the current value of the text input and open a new window
• The window has a real-time collaborative editor where the user can invite other people
• After everything is done, the original user can “send” the edited document back to the text input.

Notes

• Yes, you can just use Google Docs but where’s the fun in that?
• It is extremely likely that we are using the wrong tool for the job.
• There are many ways to do rich text editing so it is unlikely to be supported
• There are some really cool plug-and-play solutions for real-time collaborative editing
  • Tiptap
  • Yjs has bindings for CodeMirror, ProseMirror, and more