SBIR Phase I: Zulip threaded group chat

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是群聊技术，使知识工作者能够比以往任何时候都更有效地协作。它是第一个使用户能够在同一系统中有效地进行实时和异步对话的工具，每个用户只阅读那些对他们重要的对话。特别是，该技术使团队能够在数小时或数天内异步举行的虚拟会议中做出决策。这与现有的群聊技术形成对比，在现有的群聊技术中，一旦有人开始谈论其他事情，对话通常就会结束。这种进行长时间虚拟会议的能力对于需要跨不同地点和时区协调工作的大型团队来说是非常宝贵的。大型的分布式团队正在迅速成为组织运作的标准，因为即时通信和全球化使这样的团队成为未来的劳动力。协调这些团队的工作是公司的一个巨大痛点，而这项技术是该领域最先进的一次飞跃。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目有两个关键研究目标：将技术扩展到10，000+规模的团队，并确定将技术移植到移动的的可行性。一个主要的可扩展性研究领域是搜索。该公司设想该技术将成为做出决策的主要场所，因此也是存储知识的主要场所，因此快速全文搜索非常重要，尽管聊天产生的流量比电子邮件多得多。关于移动的的一个研究领域是在小的移动的屏幕上显示对话导航的丰富选项的HCI挑战。这个问题是这项技术所独有的，因为长时间的异步会话意味着用户通常不会严格按照时间顺序阅读消息。该公司预计第一阶段的赠款将使其能够开发一个工作解决方案的搜索可扩展性问题，和一个工作原型的性能和生产力的移动的用户体验。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is group chat technology that enables knowledge workers to collaborate more effectively than ever before. It is the first tool built that empowers users to efficiently carry out both real-time and asynchronous conversations in the same system, with each user reading only those conversations that are important to them. In particular, the technology empowers teams to make decisions in virtual meetings that take place asynchronously over periods of hours or days. This is in contrast with existing group chat technology, where conversations usually end as soon as someone starts talking about something else. This ability to conduct long running, virtual meetings is invaluable for large teams that need to coordinate work across different locations and time zones. Large, distributed teams are fast becoming the norm for how organizations operate, as instant communication and globalization make such teams the workforce of the future. Coordinating the efforts of such teams is a huge pain point for companies, and this technology is a leap in the state of the art in this space.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project has two key research objectives: scaling the technology to work for teams of size 10,000+, and determining the feasibility of porting the technology to mobile. A major scalability research area is search. The company envisions the technology to be the primary place where decisions are made, and hence a primary place where knowledge is stored, so fast, full-text search is important, despite the fact that chat generates much more traffic than email. One research area on mobile is the HCI challenge of displaying rich options for conversation navigation on a small mobile screen. The problem is unique to this technology, since having long running, asynchronous conversations means that users do not typically read messages in a strictly chronological fashion. The company anticipates the Phase I grant will enable it to develop a working solution to the search scalability problem, and a working prototype of a performant and productive mobile user experience.