Decentralized Sharing
draft-dejong-decentralized-sharing-00

Abstract

This draft describes the steps and challenges of sharing documents between persons, using internet-connected servers. We investigate the situation where a document exists on a server to which the sender has access through some software application, but the recipient(s) don't. All recipient(s) do, however, have access to software applications that run on least one other server. We discuss existing and proposed methods for the sender to initiate the communication, for each recipient to become aware of the sender's intent to share a document, for each recipient to access the document directly, for the document contents to be transmitted to server(s) to which the recipient(s) have access, for the sender to make and announce changes in the document after it was initially sent, and for the recipient(s) to communicate comments and proposed changes to the document back to the sender. We also discuss how semantics of the document may be communicated, and how versioning conflicts may then in some cases be resolved programmatically. Given that users of personal servers don't all run the same compatible software on their server, the sending application needs to discover which application-level protocols are supported by the receiving application(s).

Authors

Michiel B. de Jong
Paul Tran-Van

(Note: The e-mail addresses provided for the authors of this Internet-Draft may no longer be valid.)