flockfs, a Moderated Group Authoring System for Wireless Workgroups

This paper describes the design and implementation of a group authoring system for wireless users. The authors' analysis of the behavior of various groupware systems using wireless user availability traces showed that prior systems would have performed poorly, especially during peak availability durations when many group members were simultaneously available. These results motivate their design choices. flockfs maintains one updateable copy of the shared content on each group member's node. It also hoards read-only copies of each of these updateable copies in any interested group member's node. The various copies are reconciled using a moderation operation; each group member manually incorporates updates from all the other group members into their own copy.