New features: Read-only and Restore

This week, we're launching two new features to help you manage the waves you create: making participants read-only and restoring a wave to an earlier state.

Read-Only Participants
The creator of a wave can now change other participants on the wave between full access and read-only by clicking on their picture at the top of the wave panel, and selecting the access level in the drop-down:



As the name implies, read-only participants are prevented from making any changes to the wave, including adding new participants. They can, however, view live changes to the wave, and look at the history in playback.

You can make entire groups read-only as well, including the "public" group, which includes all Google Wave users. Note that individual permissions take precedence over group permissions, so even if a group has full access, an individual can be given read-only access, and vice versa.

Restore from Playback
Anyone with full access to a wave can now restore that wave to any previous state visible in playback:



Restoring does not delete anything from the playback history, but adds the restored state to the end of the history. That way you can use the new restore function to correct mistakes you or others make in a wave (including restoring the the wrong state!).

For the Public people
We've occasionally received reports from users of public waves that they found it difficult to keep their waves on topic. Read-only and restore may help in such cases: the creator of the wave can make some participants read-only, and then restore the wave to a point they liked.

Future Features
These two simple features are only the beginning of a set of things on our drawing board aimed at giving users better control over waves they create. For example, we're planning to introduce a third access setting -- 'Reply-only' -- that would let users add new blips, but prevent them from editing blips they did not create. We're also re-designing the interface to let you change permissions for several participants more easily.

As always, we welcome your feedback on the new features.

Happy Waving!

Posted by Narelle Cozens, Software Engineer, Google Wave Team

Debatewise Global Youth Panel: Waving on climate change

We asked David Crane, from Debatewise.org, to write a post about how Google Wave was used by the Global Youth Panel to debate climate change in parallel with the Copenhagen conference last month. As they prepare for a second phase of the debates, here's what he had to say about waving with a large international group.

We at Debatewise.org spent the last part of 2009 putting together a Global Youth Panel, a group of 1,000 young people from over 130 different countries, to debate issues arising from the Copenhagen climate change conference. We wanted to harness views from a wide range of people and thought Google Wave would be the very best tool for the job.

We had people sign up from Iraq, South Korea, Myanmar, Bhutan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Vietnam, 25 countries in Africa, 30-odd in Europe, many parts of Asia and both halves of the Americas. As you’ll imagine, not everyone was blessed with fast machines or equipped with deep technical expertise. Most don’t speak English as a first language. To cap it off, we came up with the idea just six weeks before the conference started.



So it’s fair to say we took on a challenge or two. The tight deadline meant we were using Google Wave out-of-the-box, we had to get quite a few people familiar with the new technology in a short space of time and as anyone who’s worked with large groups of people knows, working with large groups of people is hard.

To organize the debates, our structural approach was to create one index wave containing links to all the debates, each of which had its own set of sub-waves, one for each point making up the debate. The goal was to keep the discussion as manageable and as on-topic as possible.


So far, so straightforward. But the other thing we needed was for the debaters to continually form summaries of the discussion in the first blip. We tried asking and telling people to do this in our daily emails but what seemed to work best was modelling it by leaving little notes in a blip saying “Part of point added to the summary.” This rewarded people publicly, highlighted the type of conversation we wanted to see more of and demonstrated the action we hoped others would take.

This behavioural modelling is, I think, the trick to getting people used to a new environment. Happily, the ability to model behaviour is something Google Wave does brilliantly - from the subtle appearance of an icon in a blip to the real-time typing element and highly useful Playback feature. I’m a huge believer in collective intelligence and think these tools give Google Wave significant advantages over a traditional wiki for bringing new participants into the fold. As a result, we had healthy, live debates on a global scale, giving a voice to youth around the planet in an international forum, and have learned what to do next time.

We're looking forward to the second phase of our project, which starts on January 18th, when our panel will be asked to debate how decisions made in Copenhagen will impact them and their communities. We’ll also ask people to argue from the opposite position to the one they would normally adopt. For example, Bangladeshis might be asked to argue why they do not deserve 15% of any climate fund while the rest of the world argues why they do.

We are always looking for to include people who are passionate about these topics and debate so if you would like to get involved please contact us.


Posted by David Crane, Debatewise

Be bold!

There's a simple, powerful, and fun technique which leads to a better Google Wave experience for you and your friends: edit other people's content! You can edit any message in a wave, not just those you started.

Waves are often shared among a group of people with a common goal: perhaps planning a party or recording meeting notes. When working together, people often hesitate to edit the words of others, especially when they're not the document's original author. But this restraint can be harmful to collaboration. Instead of adding a reply to a wave, ask yourself if everyone might be happy if you just changed the text you're replying to. You can edit a message by double-clicking or by selecting "Edit this message" from the menu at its top-right corner.



For example, your friends might appreciate you discreetly fixing their spelling mistakes rather than pointing them out. You can also delete messages. If a short back-and-forth has resulted in a quick decision, why not replace the conversation with the outcome and justification rather than make everyone else read through the dialogue?

Gardening is a term we use to mean summarising, deleting old content and generally tidying a wave up. Gardening keeps a wave at its most fruitful. As discussions lead to resolutions it's often helpful to weed out the old comments, replacing them with the final result. The original text will always be available in playback but pruning the conversation will make it easier for new participants to follow, and for you too when you next open the wave. You needn't be afraid of trimming some text in an attempt to make the wave more useful. A wave is a shared space and your friends or colleagues will silently thank you for cultivating it.



Wikipedia is a another example of the power of working together. Wikipedia editing guidelines encourage users to be bold. Wikis develop faster if everyone jumps in to add content, fix problems, and tend to the articles. It requires a little politeness and a willingness to let others improve upon your contributions, but it works! Wikipedia encourages you to do what you think is right and accept that others will do the same. This "ask forgiveness rather than permission" policy makes a huge difference to the quality of an article and how fast it can evolve. Openness maximises the potential for collaboration, a huge gain over restricting permissions "just in case" someone acts maliciously.

A great example of this principle in Google Wave is when you and your friends are collaborating on a list. Say you're taking a holiday next week and your friend starts a wave that includes list of things to take. You could make a reply suggesting additions to the list – or you could be bold and add your items directly to the list. Your friends will see the change highlighted when they next view the wave and can always take the items back out again if they disagree. Most often, though, you've both saved your friend some work and kept your wave neatly tended.

We edit each other's waves all the time while working on Google Wave. Because we think it's such a powerful technique, we're working on features to make gardening easier. To begin, we're adding a more obvious "Edit" button so it's easier to get started. Coming soon is a "restore" button, which winds back a wave to a previous state. This will allow you to revert recent changes in case someone (even you!) messes up a wave. Other features on our roadmap will help you organise the content in a wave and emphasise recently edited portions. We're also working on more granular access controls for waves, like allowing some participants to read a wave but not edit it. While openness and trust is best for collaboration, sometimes you really do need limitations so we're working on flexible ways to express this.

Posted by Alex North and Shane Stephens, Software engineers, Google Wave team