SBIR Phase I: Zulip threaded group chat

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是群聊技术，它使知识型员工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高效地执行实时和异步对话的工具，每个用户只阅读对他们来说重要的对话。特别是，这项技术使团队能够在几个小时或几天的时间内异步举行的虚拟会议上做出决定。这与现有的群聊技术形成了鲜明对比，在现有的群聊技术中，对话通常在某人开始谈论其他事情后立即结束。对于需要跨不同地点和时区协调工作的大型团队来说，这种举行长时间虚拟会议的能力是非常宝贵的。随着即时通信和全球化使大型分布式团队成为未来的劳动力，大型分布式团队正迅速成为组织运营的标准。协调这些团队的努力对公司来说是一个巨大的痛点，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：将该技术扩展到适用于10,000个规模的团队，以及确定将该技术移植到移动设备的可行性。一个主要的可伸缩性研究领域是搜索。该公司预计，这项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，尽管聊天产生的流量比电子邮件多得多，但快速的全文搜索很重要。移动领域的一个研究领域是在移动小屏幕上显示丰富的对话导航选项的人机界面挑战。这个问题是这种技术独有的，因为长时间运行的异步对话意味着用户通常不会以严格的时间顺序阅读消息。该公司预计，第一阶段的拨款将使其能够为搜索可伸缩性问题开发一个可行的解决方案，以及一个性能卓越和富有成效的移动用户体验的可行原型。

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.