There's been a lot of discussion about publishing and sharing the software that Mystery Hunt teams use to collaborate to solve puzzles. This is mostly misguided, IMO: teams are very different, and they organically grow solutions to fit their unique processes. On the other hand, an increasing number of teams (including my team, Codex), are building their collaboration software on top of Google services, especially Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Rather than trying to collaborate on One True Hunt Team Software, I think it would be far more useful (for all teams) to lobby for improvements to Google's services. These raise the bar for everyone, and indirectly benefit many other people with collaborative processes.
So here's my list of improvements I'd like to see in Google services:
- Integrating Docs and Spreadsheet. If we had an initial "sheet" of the spreadsheet with editable formatted text (not spreadsheet cells) we could actually do away with the wiki we use for capturing free form thoughts and links related to a puzzle.
- Integrating Spreadsheet chat, Google Talk, and Jabber. We could just use the chat in the spreadsheet if it were open and accessible, instead of creating our own per-puzzle chat rooms.
- Making publish and "setAnonymous" access available via APIs that actually work. We need to use Google Doc Script to do the setAnonymousAccess call, which is not exported via the otherwise-more-complete GData APIs, and drive a headless Firefox 2 instance via Selenium to get the publish bits enabled for the spreadsheet. That's ridiculous.
- Providing a way for Google Doc Scripts on a spreadsheet to export data more easily. We can use a Google Form to create a spreadsheet for a puzzle, but no easy way to provide a link to that spreadsheet on the page that results after form submission, or redirect from there.
- IIRC Google Talk support for multi-user chat is still barely supported. It doesn't use the standard Jabber protocols, for one. If this were a better supported/more standard service, we wouldn't have to run our own Jabber server.
- And, of course, the "next generation" of all this would integrate audio and video into the chat as well. Video is probably more useful, as it communicates human emotional cues. Audio isn't easily archived or searchable, and doesn't work well in crowded rooms, so it is less useful to us. But it would be great if we could actually see some/many/most of the particants in ringhunters, maybe little live video icons next to their faces.
Any further suggestions from other teams?