Chapter 10
A different way of looking at databases
What happens at the meeting places?
Every route through a tree like structure in a people space will end at a meeting place where people can establish a presence and have an opportunity to communicate and interact with the others who are present.
For the moment, we'll skip over the questions of making sure there are enough people there to make it interesting, or, of getting the details of those who are present – these questions will be dealt with in the next chapter when we cover bots and overall system organisation and house keeping. Firstly, we need to establish what form these meeting places might take.
As there could be any number of these meeting places, they would have to be able to be created on demand, from a single template. Just like the list modules from which the trees are constructed, these meeting places would need to be produced as and when they are needed without having to use custom programming or call upon any human management system to make the necessary arrangements. When a user sees a need for a new topic to be discussed, they should be able to create a new meeting place simply by giving it a topic name and clicking on a button.
Having to use a single format for all the meeting places, it will be necessary for the design to offer a wide range of options for people to be able to communicate with each other in a variety of different ways. Many options can be covered by bots on the client side, but, for the moment let's look at the kind of template that can be provided to create meeting places on a Web site.
At a minimum, the meeting place would have to provide the following facilities:
1) A list of the people who have currently established a presence
2) An e-mail discussion forum
3) A message bulletin board
4) A news group
5) Facilities for instant messaging (peer to peer or chat rooms)
6) List of associated meeting places
7) List of relevant Web sites
This arrangement is illustrated in figure 10.2.
Figure 10.2
Each meeting place in the formatted people space will take the form of an environment in its own right, with various types of communication facilities provided. This environment will have to be designed as a template so that it can be recreated for every meeting place needed
At any particular meeting place, different facilities might be used according to the preferences of the people who have established a presence there. There is no way of being able to determine in advance what these preferences might be, so, all options must be offered so as to allow each meeting place to evolve in its own.