This young movement militates in favor of  developing direct democracy processes, in a context of a strong delegitimization of the Spanish political institutions. It used co-ment to submit the draft of its political program to comments as part of co-elaboration process.

First, a citizen’s debate has been organized during ten days, in January and February 2013, to discuss the future program of the movement, titled Democratia y punto. Once the first version established, El Partido del futuro offered to the public the opportunity, during March 2013, to annotate the program online via co-ment.

The platform allowed citizens, once registered on it with their email address, to comment on the drafting of the different texts composing the program and/or submit alternative drafting proposals.

The six texts put online received on average about fifty comments each. A number of 133 comments has been reached on the text dedicated the transparency of public management.

The final version of the program is now online on El Partido del futuro’s website. For all the four themes developped (referendum, open government, transparency and vote), visitors are able to visualize all the modifications made thanks to the participation of the citizens on the co-ment platform.

• Yes, you can now export a text with its comments to an open XML format and reimport it in another co-ment instance or process it to generate for instance eBook formats.
• The text and comments displays have been redesigned to deliver better legibility and an improved interface consistency. In particular, we now use state-of-the-art free HTML5 fonts with carefully designed display parameters. Icons have also been redesigned.
• It is now possible for co-ment PRO users to define customized CSS rules to meet specific needs (for instance for poetry or technical manuals).
• The Drupal co-ment module runs on Drupal 7. This means that Drupal sites can display several co-ment texts in a single page view.
• The XHTML import has been significantly improved to better preserve the formatting of imported texts.
• Several performance improvements have been implemented to enable annotating of book-length texts. Note that if you plan to have a great number of annotations, it remains preferable to divide a book in chapters and annotate them separately.

Abiword^(TM) for document conversion back-end

Abiword logo

The most hidden improvement provided by this new version concerns the back-end that handles the format conversion of the uploaded files for document creation in co-ment. This back-end switched from LibreOffice to Abiword¹.

This change was mainly motivated by two considerations :

• Firstly, co-ment documents created from uploaded files are better rendered while converted by Abiword. It’s evident for .doc files, particularly if they contain tables for instance².
• Secondly, Abiword is lighter than LibreOffice, while it is stabler on document conversion, less error prone³ and quicker, particularly when handling several document conversion in parallel.

Drupal^(TM) integration

co-ment Drupal integration

Sopinspace has improved its Drupal module that allows to seamlessly integrate co-ment documents in Drupal websites. This release provides a better support of Drupal 7, thinner management of user rights (allowing for instance a user to delete its own comments) or the exact case matching in user names between the two platforms…

Comment permalink : ¶

Another new feature presents itself as permalinks, added for each comment, and allowing to reach a particular comment from a simple URL, even through Drupal or any other iframe-based integration of co-ment. The permalink is visualised by a paragraph sign (¶), which appears at the end of the comment title if the pointer hovers it.

Graphical user interface improvements

New design of the "Add comment" button

Comment number tooltip

A lot of minor graphical improvements occurred recently. For instance, the “Add comment” button comes with a new design and a clear label on it. The collapsible part of the interface is now fitted with a graphical handle. The number of comments is shown in a tooltip when hovering commented areas with the mouse cursor…

Math formulas

Math formulas in co-ment via ASCIIMATHML.js

Developing Sharing-TheBook.com, the online complement of the eponymous book from Philippe Aigrain, a need for math formula edition in HTML co-ment documents clearly appeared. To fill this need, we added ASCIIMathML.js library support in co-ment documents, which allows to easily describe math formulas in the middle of the HTML code (for instance) and then displays them nicely in visualisation mode. Please, refer to the library documentation for more details. Also note that presently, to comment on a formula, one must select some text before and after it. This is a provisional “feature”.

Software feedback, contributions, specific needs

COMT, the co-ment software, is a libre software which development is supported on the co-ment.org community website. To report a bug, suggest new features or submit patches, we invite you to create a free user account on it.

For specific developments or urgent needs, please contact us directly via contact (at) co-ment.com.

1. LibreOffice back-end is still optionally available, but Abiword becomes the new default setting in COMT.
2. This is partly due to the integration of the dedicated and cutting edge wvWare libraries in Abiword recently.
3. i.e. if a conversion fails it only affects one attempt of one user, when LibreOffice globally crashes until it’s relaunched

Exciting applications of co-ment^® for law-making processes are developing in the European parliament, in France, or in Brazil. Initially, this usage was at the initiative of civil society groups. Today, Members of Parliaments are using co-ment themselves to interact with the public when laws and other parliamentary texts are prepared of discussed. In our featured example, the ALDE and Green groups of the European Parliament jointly prepared, at the initiative of ALDE MEP Marietje Schaake, a resolution on ACTA. Close to a hundred comments were submitted, and the affluence of thousand of readers was such for a few hours that we experimented a temporary overflow of our servers, that we are now equipping for future demanding usage of this type.

In France, a a href=”https://cpaul.co-ment.com/” alt=”link to co-ment instance”>remarkable collaborative exercise was conducted by socialist MP Christian Paul for the preparation of a French law proposal on network neutrality. More than 200 comments were submitted by interested parties and experts. You can access the diff display illustrating the changes made to the law further to these comments.

We have now put in place a contextual aid to help you making the proper decisions at these steps. By bringing your pointer on the question mark icon after the corresponding dropdown menus, you will obtain information on the meaning of each choice. Here is a summary of all possible situations:

• For writing a text on-line and revising it based on comments, choose Create a text and then markdown format.
• For submitting a web page to comments, choose Create a text, then HTML format and paste the contents of the Web page in the editor.
• When starting with a text processing document with complex formatting (images, tables) and having no plan to revise it within co-ment: choose Upload a text and then HTML format.
• When starting with a text processing document with no complex formatting or planning to revise it within co-ment: choose Upload a text and then markdown format. Note that if the text has complex formatting, some format editing in markdown may be necessary.

When you are editing a markdown text, the graphical editor will provide you with the essential formating functionality. See the detailed presentation of markdown syntax, and its pandoc flavor. Finally here are some important tips regarding [pandoc] markdown formatting:

• To force line returns, put two trailing spaces at the end of a line
• To create endnotes use the
  ^[text of endnote]
  syntax.

Just like other players, Sopinspace (the company developing and operating co-ment) searches for the answer by experimenting. For one-and-a-half year, we conducted a real-life experiment with co-ment 1. The new business model of co-ment 2 is the product of our assessment of this experiment and our vision of future commons-compatible markets. The business model is based on the combination of 3 channels:

• A free-of-charge service which is fully functional for people or groups who want to co-operate on a text (annotating, commenting, and drafting it) for a limited period of time, but that does not provide group management and perennial storage facilities nor a personalized support.
• A for-pay PRO service, which can be obtained on a per-month basis. The price of this service is tuned to reflect both costs and the need for continued investment in co-ment. There are special offers in particular for education users.
• Additional services for assistance to install, integration into information systems, securisation, grouped offers for large organization, development of additional functionality, etc.

This is open for comments.

• All the functionality of co-ment^® lies in the COMT software that powers a co-ment worskpace. For access to the full source code, including server code, please check the community site. COMT is distributed under the GNU Affero GPL version 3 or any later version. Please be aware of the additional trademark clause reserving the usage of the co-ment trademark and check the trademark use regulation for permissions. Note that the commercial wrapper of the co-ment PRO service is not distributed, in contrast to what we did for an earlier version. In practice, including the commercial wrapper (which is nothing else that a Website) in the distributed code was complicating the installation of the software within one own’s IT infrastructure. Today, if you are a subscriber to the co-ment PRO service you get exactly the functionality provided by your co-ment workspace by installing the distributed code.
• All the data relevant to the workspace of a subscriber to the co-ment PRO service is stored in one separate database, that you can export for re-use in your own installation.
• You can also export individual texts and their comments to an open XML format, though we recognize that this format is not at the level of documentation and reusability that it should ideally have.

Collective work on the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales

Some of the greatest use cases of co-ment^® are for education, in particular first language and literature teaching in secondary education. The co-ment team has supported usage by a number of pioneers in text-centered teaching. Typically, educational use of co-ment is pure annotation, in contrast to other use cases where the collective production and revision of text play a key role. co-ment is used for the collaborative preparation of lessons (teachers annotating texts) and for classroom usage (students commenting texts). We are excited by these use cases.

They are evidence to the remarkable potential of text-centered education when it is provided by adequate tools. Co-ment is also used in universities for scholarly work on texts and we expect it to become a reference tool for some collective efforts where important works are annotated in view of critical editions. In co-ment 2, we have decided to recognize the specific potential of educational use in two manners:

• By developing specifically tailored user right settings to further enable usage in teaching. Teachers will be able to choose between collective work (comments being visible to all students) and student-teacher dialogue (comments being privately shared between the teacher and each student).
• By offering special commercial rates to teachers. Note that co-ment 2 PRO offers functionality which is similar to what was the “personalized instance” level of service in co-ment 1. co-ment 2 PRO is priced about twice more than co-ment 1 PRO and 10 times less than co-ment 1 Personalized instance. For teachers, co-ment 2 PRO will not be more expensive than co-ment 1 PRO.
• We also have special offers for sets of co-ment 2 PRO accounts for schools. Please enquire to commercial@co-ment.com, precising the number of teachers you want to provide with workspaces.

If you have used the 1st version of co-ment, discover the main changes in co-ment® version 2.

Text editor inside

You can create new texts or edit your previously uploaded ones through the text editor integrated into co-ment. To organize your text, choose between 3 languages: the extended pandoc flavor of markdown (recommended), HTML or RST.

Encapsulating your co-ment® texts into your website

Want your visitors to comment your text using co-ment while remaining on your website? Paste on your site the piece of HTML code that is provided for this purpose for each text. See an example. At this stage, works only for public texts (viewable by all).

A text’s life

You can edit your text, taking in account modification proposals from commentators for example. co-ment allows version management. You can switch back to a previous version any time and visualize changes between any two versions. When you create a new one, you can keep the received comments or discard them.

Contributor and role management

Create a working group easily around a text or a set of texts. Invite your contributors on the fly and give them a common role or give some of them a specific role: observer, commentator, moderator, editor or manager.

RSS feed, e-mail : choose your alert tool

To be alerted of new contributions to a text (new comment, new version), a RSS feed and an e-mail alert system are provided for each text.

Activity-meter

You can view your group’s activity at different levels (global, for a specific text or member). You can adjust the graph’s time-frame: day, week or month.

Browse through comments easily

What if your text receives a lot of comments? You can display or browse them according to the part of the text commented, their date of arrival, their author or their tags.