So, many people have had many things to say about Gobby, the much-vaunted app with the most phenomenally awful and unfortunate name I've ever seen in a free software app. This tends to be either hype (oh my god, it will enable us to leverage synergies to maximise shareholder value like we've never leveraged synergies before!), or disappointment (is that it?). Mine is neither, really.

I don't find that collaborative editing is hugely groundbreaking; a small IRC channel which everyone uses to document things, then assembled into a text document from there, can do roughly the same job. One thing we've been using it for at Ubuntu Below Zero is taking notes in BoFs. Most people in the BoF log in and the main note taker does the bulk of the work, and either him or the assignee steers conversation.

Normally in BoFs, I either get so involved in it that I forget that I'm supposed to be taking notes and thus don't, or tune out somewhat and forget to take any notes, and have to reconstruct it from vague memories later on. What Gobby is useful for in this case, is keeping the note-taker honest. If the notetaker is writing down anything inaccurate, you can just fix it; if they're forgetting to take notes at all, you can stop talking and throw some Mentos at them.

I think this alone makes it tremendously useful for stuff like note-taking in BoF sessions, and could be useful for minuting conference calls also. Adding the IRCalike interface is useful too as an out-of-band channel to throw URLs around (and to give Seb crap about using azerty) also. So I'm pretty sure I'll keep using it for that.