Enabling Editing of Public Parts

brucebartlett

Hi all, I think it would really encourage interaction/collaborations if you could enable editing of public parts without having to do a copy of the part or asked to be added as a collaborator.

If I am sharing a part to the community for comment I'd like to be able to add a switch (under the make private) allowing people to add branch's with their idea's. Still think the main branch need to remain the owners. At the moment you either do a copy or send your email to the creator to be added on. 

Could get messy with 100's of people adding branches but think that would be rare. If it happened you'd have to be on to a good thing and wouldn't have shared public to start with.

What are others thoughts?

andrew_troup

A discretionary switch per @BruceBartlett 's proposal seems like a good idea to me. 

3dcad

What if you would ask for permission to participate ( add branch) and owner can set in 'forking options' how to handle permissions: allow all, allow to friends (yes) or allow manually. This way owner would still have full control over who can participate. 

lougallo

You can do this now with Organizations.  Make a document public then add those that you want to an org and share with the org.  We hope to have more granular sharing options in the future.

3dcad

I think the main issue currently would be: How could a user from other side of the world with completely different timezone instantly participate without the need to send a private message to the owner and wait for answer.

_Ðave_

@BruceBartlettI very much like this concept especially the main branch to only be edited by the owner or preferable an option to allow editing by owner only. Actually i would like to have a switch like this on all branches.

lougallo

@3dcad That would follow the same thoughts around Github.. like a pull request https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/  This would be different that making a copy of the public doc (in Git speak -> clone).  This is an interesting option and might be feasible once permissions are more granular.

onshaper

I, too, want public documents that can be branched without requests. I want to use Onshape for open source hardware projects.

anfroholic

brucebartlett said:

Could get messy with 100's of people adding branches but think that would be rare. If it happened you'd have to be on to a good thing and wouldn't have shared public to start with.  

    "wouldn't have shared public to start with"

    Why not? In certain circumstances the benefit of making your document public are so great not doing so would be foolish. And in these (hopefully many) instances IMHO I believe a) having their work cited is important, you get the ability to have the latest version in your own document and less importantly but still substantial is b) to take people's ego into account. (and with full history documentation these contributions could be quantified in some manner) Make the history count.
  
    "And I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that everything we do is creative and everything we do becomes plumbing for the next creative act."
     -Cory Doctorow
 

brucebartlett

@anfroholic I suppose I was thinking about protecting IP, real innovations are rare and most have years of work and $ behind them so can see a reluctance to look for collaboration from a public forum.

The great thing about Onshape is the barrier for sharing an idea and having others build upon it in the virtual mechanical world have been broken down. I am very excited about what can be achieved with this platform and the branching and merging features. However there will also need to a change on how product's are developed to really take advantage, this may be happening but I haven't seen it yet.

I have also been thinking about how you could invite customers into view a product in development. You could share a doc with a customer ask for their feedback then remove them from the share without losing to much IP, Only thing they may be able to get is a few screenshot (maybe sometime in the future a warning could popup to the owner if this happens). I am sure lots of new exciting ways to use Onshape will develop over time.

_Ðave_

I would like an option to have an NDA screen show before opening a shared document. In which the shared user would have to agree to before opening. Something like what MFG.com is doing.

brucebartlett

@dave_petitGreat Idea

jon_hirschtick

Great thoughts @brucebartlett and all.  Definitely something we could support really uniquely and well.

ky_ba

For the hobbyist / open hardware user, Onshape could be powerful, but understand what you are competing with. Onshape definitely provide some awesome features, but could benefit from others already out there.

Github now has the ability to diff stl files. The differ looks a lot like the one onshape uses, but the advantage for onshape is that you get the design history along with it.

Github allows a project to establish a common space (rather than just a bunch of users loosely bound by teams). This allows a project to clearly establish administrators and moderators as well as maintains the official stable branch of the model. This is a must have that Onshape is lacking. With github I can clone the repo, branch as much as I want to, and then create a pull request back into the main remote repository. This gives the administration the ability to enforce design reviews and ensure that the project is meeting it's goals. This is critical, not just in largely collaborative projects. I'm a software developer writing software for complicated automated systems so I do get involved with the mechanical and electrical design occasionally. My team is about a dozen developers, but we have widely differing views about how projects should be designed, we use git and rely heavily on peer review automated checking before anything makes it to our stable branch.

I envision creating a public part (with some sort of unique hash) initially other only have view/copy privileges. I can create my own copy, make any changes, branches, etc I want. When I'm ready, I share my part with the team, moderators, or public as I desire. Now there are two parts with a common ancestor (think commit hash). There must be the ability to merge a branch from my copy into a branch of the original file. There's the potential for all sorts of merge conflicts, so there should be some sort of pull request ability that allows me to rework my local copy while the pull request is open, and then the original part owner can make the final merge once it's ready.  If others make changes to the original, I should be able to merge from the originals main branch in the main branch of my personal copy. Now when I look at the public listing of parts, I see the original part, and nested under it, any other public parts that are descendants of it (or sub-nested decedents of those). Github, Bitbucket, etc. have really got this figured out.

One cool thing about onshape is it unifies the editor to be used. Sure you could use SolidWorks, or Inventor, or whatever CAD modeler you wanted, but you have to decide on a common file format and that means importing and exporting and all the horrors entailed. With Onshape, the model tree history remains intact and there is a common modeler that everyone can use that is consistent. Use other CAD packages at your own risk, but you can always rely on the cloud CAD. This still has problems. Suppose I design an awesome part in SolidWorks, I upload it to Onshape, some others then make modifications, but we realize that Onshape just doesn't have the feature set to get the part just right. So I export to a more powerful CAD format and I use special features of my CAD package to modify the part. How do I get those changes into my Onshape part??? 

If I use current open source strategies, I would need enforce a common file format and pray that multiple users can import, edit, and export with minimal headaches, and also consistently generate the stl files so they can be easily compared.

I'm excited about Onshape, but the limitations of the free account and the lack of git-like collaboration is keeping me from commiting to it yet.

For now, I'm looking at using my own OpenProject/Redmine serve with git integration.

pete_7

lougallo said:

@3dcad That would follow the same thoughts around Github.. like a pull request https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests/  This would be different that making a copy of the public doc (in Git speak -> clone).  This is an interesting option and might be feasible once permissions are more granular.

Has there been any progress towards this? I am really looking for a CAD workflow like GitHub's fork/pull model, and maybe the Google Docs-esque live editing ability for trusted collaborators. Even still, documentation, review, discussions in the pull requests can be turned into valuable documentation.

outstanding

_Ðave_ said:

I would like an option to have an NDA screen show before opening a shared document. In which the shared user would have to agree to before opening. Something like what MFG.com is doing.

That's from 2015... I can see this "NDA screen" useful also for open source documents, in the way that I could present a license (some CC variant) *before* people get to see the goods.

nick_papageorge073

I see this is an old thread.... IMO, no one cares about other's public documents. Everyone care's about whatever they are working on, and that is it. It's hard enough to form a "team" of strangers to work on something intentionally together. (And OS has tools to do that). Some random part that a random user made is of no interest to other random users.

When I first made my OS account, I would browse the public documents to see what others were up to. I haven't done it since in 3 years.