And *that* is why I'm building Querki

Apr 13, 2016 15:19

Really, today's XKCD summarizes my elevator pitch remarkably well:

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jducoeur April 13 2016, 20:08:00 UTC
Well, among other things it's why Querki is going to have universal version control built in fairly soon. (Really, as soon as possible, but we need to get up and running in the cluster first before I can start that project.)

But seriously: Querki's elevator pitch is coming to focus on the fact that small communities have basically no proper tools to manage their information, and the result is that they wind up doing *insane* things with spreadsheets because it's the only hammer they have. So I'm building a tool that has most of those building blocks built in instead.

(And I'm fascinated by the choice of example, since it's been on my mind so much. I'm beginning to think that scheduling may be one of Querki's killer apps, and I'm chewing on what features are necessary in order to do that well...)

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jducoeur April 13 2016, 20:29:51 UTC
Having thought about it for a while, I'm almost convinced scheduling is AI-Hard. At least, automatic scheduling.

Oh, totally agreed, but that's not my goal -- rather, I'm spending some serious thought on how to *help* people deal with this sort of constraint-solving problem. Not solve it automatically, just make it easier to play with the options and tradeoffs. It's a fascinating problem; I'd love to chat about it with you sometime.

Interesting point on the spatialization. I keep tossing around the idea of a "spreadsheet view" in Querki, and have almost implemented it several times. On the one hand, it's too limited to represent the more complex possibilities, and sucks if the data gets at all wide; OTOH, it's a visual metaphor folks are used to, and which works well for simpler problems, which are likely to be the most common case. Ponder, ponder...

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