Google Docs is great if you want to collaborate synchronously: that is, if you want every keystroke to be seen immediately by your collaborators. But that’s not always what users want. Sometimes it’s better to work in isolation for a while, and to share your work when it’s ready. We call this asynchronous collaboration.
When several people work on a document asynchronously, at some point the time comes when you want to merge those changes, and that’s where things get difficult. Our latest paper, on Peritext, addresses this problem. It allows several users’ edits to a rich-text document to be merged while preserving each user’s edits as much as possible. Peritext brings a Git-like collaboration model (with arbitrary branching and merging) to rich text, but without manual resolution of merge conflicts.
Besides the article, our prototype implementation is also open source. Hope you find it interesting!