VisualEditor/Real-time collaboration/Timeline

Historical overview of work done towards VisualEditor/Real-time_collaboration.

2011 Spring - Trevor & Neil picked the brains of people who did w:Apache Wave (neé Google Wave), w:Etherpad, and more. Their concepts have already influenced some of Trevor's experiments, particularly annotated text over DOM-like hierarchical nodes.
2011-04-21 - Talked to Etherpad-fork startup Hackpad - meeting record
2011-05-05 - 2011-05-06 Hackpad engineers work in WMF offices with Neil, create quick demo of Hackpad as a host for an editing session, via a user script. Brion and Neil write a spec for MediaWiki integration.
2011-05-10 - Project posted on Wikitech-l by Neil and Brion Vibber, blogged (needs update) here
2011-05-15 - Neil gives lightning talk at Berlin Hackathon.
2011-06-23 - Defining user stories, deliverables
2011-07-01 - Neil has local etherpad hostable, needs help making the Hackpad hacks work

2012-02-11 - User:Wikinaut releases Extension:EtherpadLite.
2012-02-16 - Statement that VisualEditor was built with affordance for real-time, collaborative editing. The development outline for a VE CollabPad is posted on the same page in March.
2012-06-19 - Mark Holmquist sets up and announces an instance of EtherEditor that works pretty well.
2012-08-16 - Mark Holmquist ran a testing sprint for EtherEditor, exposed a bunch of bugs, and is getting closer to a stable implementation.

WikiEducator's CollabOERate has the CollabOERate gadget up and running, based on Mozilla's TogetherJS. Requires "modern browser" (perhaps does not work with IE?)

2014-08-09 Real-time Collaborative Editing with TogetherJS Wikimania 2014 (session)
- proof-of-concept implementation as a JS gadget using togetherJS and a lightweight server