Q: Is this project of some interest?

[Riccardo Bernardini]

Dear all,
I believe this is the right list for this message.  If it is not,
please point me to the right list (and accept my apologizes).

For several reasons (let me skip them), at my University we are
thinking about starting a project involving ODF and we would like to
know if there is already something similar to what we would like to
produce and it the  LibreOffice community could have some interest in
it.

The project is about providing LibreOffice with a "Google Docs-like"
simultaneous editing capability, but with some improvements and a
bazaar (or git) flavor.
In our vision, each user has control about a "section" of the text
(for simplicity, we are aiming mainly to text documents) and every
changes made to the document are propagated to all the users currently
on-line (with an experience similar to "Google Docs").  The difference
with Google Docs is that the document is not in some fuzzy "cloud,"
but on the user's disk and the user can edit it while off-line,
encrypt it, ...  If the user does some changes while off-line, the
other copies will receive the updates as soon as the user returns
on-line.  Different copies will exchange updates in a peer-to-peer
fashion, without the need of a centralized repository (the bazaar/git
flavor).

This feature is my "personal itch" since I would actually use to write
"many-hands" documents together with colleagues. Moreover, it would be
an important feature of LibreOffice, not shared by other editing
solutions.

We are aware that there are many technical issues.  For some issues we
have solutions, for others we are still "combing our ideas."  However,
before going beyond the "idea combing" stage, I would like to ask the
following questions:

1.  Are you aware if this type of capability is already available (I
do not think so) or currently developed?
2. Has the LibreOffice community some interest in this idea?  If it
has, this would give us a stronger motivation.
3. Do you have some general suggestions for us?  Especially about
interfacing the rest of the developers.

Thank you for any help you can give us.

Regards,

Riccardo