Active notifications

Abstract

Some modern version-control systems automatically generate notifications as side effects of checking-in versions. We consider here the dual idea of automatically checking-in versions as side effects of manual email notification about them. This approach combines the benefits of current email, file, and version-control systems, offering a familiar and available user-interface, version management, and actor and observer control on sharing. It can be designed to (a) allow its benefits to be proportional to the degree of autonomy among the systems of various collaborators, and (b) co-exist with existing sharing approaches.