Talhonia

Talhonia is an online tool for creating stories together. It is a collaborative media platform that enables multiple online users to work on a common media experience at the same time. Talhonia is a first step in the direction of synchronous collaboration between multiple online remote users that are engaged to create a story, a video, a book, or any other common media experience. The tool aims to stimulate and inspire a community, a group of friends, a family, or people with a common interest, to create the outline of a book, to create the storyline of a play, to create the script of a movie, etc. The thing that makes Talhonia unique is that it enables multiple users to work simultaneously on the same story in an intuitive way. At the same time users can write or change a section of a story, share the results, etc.

This sets a huge number of challenges of interaction between users while working together. To steer the creation of stories multiple features are developed to access parts of the story, to track the contributions of other users, etc. It remains to be seen if the solutions are adequate and relevant in a real life setting. What happens in case of conflict between users? Who is allowed access which part of the story? Who determines the storyline of the different sections? How can users influence each other contributions? How to end conflicts.
The application has no intention to foresee the online tools for creating or editing the media experience itself. Offline tools are much faster and better suited to do this work. Web-based editing tools for pictures and videos do not exist due to their high demand for CPU power and bandwidth demand. Moreover depending on the skills and expertise of the user, different editing tools will be used. The users will want to select those editing tools they are familiar with. In many industries the editing tools are standardised. We might foresee plugins that export the script of the story to these various tools.
From a research perspective this is very relevant for a project focusing on co-creation based on user-generated content by non-professional users. Although Talhonia currently focuses mainly on the collaborative creation of a written text, the results are equally valid for creating richer media like pictures and video. Especially the lessons learned about conflict resolution and online collaborations will be are very valuable.

www.Talhonia.com