Prerequisites
The working relationships are known: who shares what with whom, in which roles, and what each expects about watching and being watched. Even work that looks individual has shared variations, and the mapping covers them. That mapping happens before this sequence, and no pattern here makes it.
Several people work on the same thing, each on their own screen and often at different times. They cannot see each other working, so the system has to show them who has access, who is here, who changed what, and what is waiting on whom.
Sharing the work
Share the work with named people — Sharing
Make sharing an explicit act, never a side effect: name the people and give each a level of access, such as view, comment, or edit. Access to a container passes down to what it holds, and nobody can grant more than they have. Each level promises later steps: comment access promises the discussion steps, and edit access promises everything an editor can collide with.
Decide how much unfinished work others see
Decide where each kind of work sits between live, where edits appear as they are made, and reviewed, where work reaches others only when published. Decide it per kind of work, not once for the whole system: a tool's issues can be live while its code is reviewed. Live presence applies at the live end, and the parting steps make the reviewed end workable. Weigh the cost: when everything is watched, people explore less.
Seeing each other
Applies when
Several people now work on the same thing on separate screens, each looking at a different part, so nobody sees the others. What a shared desk showed at a glance has to come through the work itself, without anyone having to write it up.
Show who is working on what
Two sides of one decision, in no set order: live presence and signed contributions. Show both where the actor already looks, and capture both as a by-product of working. People then arrange themselves around what they can see, and most collisions never happen.
In any order:
Show live presence — Presence
Match the marks to how live the work is: an avatar stack for who is here, named cursors and selections for where, and an activity signal for what. Add each only where the pace of work needs it, and fall back to a trail on slower surfaces. Following someone's view, or bringing others to yours, uses the same marks as a channel.
Sign each contribution — Provenance marking, its person-to-person face
Attach the author to every contribution when it is made: the edit, the comment, the version. The signature lets others reply to the author and read the history later. When a contributor is a machine, the same signature routes its output to the checks on relying on it.
Give everyone the same view
Let the actor hand over a view as one thing, with its filters, arrangement, and focus, so nobody has to describe how to recreate it. Hand it over as a link when people work at different times, and as a followed or spotlighted view, through the presence marks, when they work live. The view must not carry credentials or another person's private state, which the sharing step rules out.
Contributing in place
Applies when
People can see each other, and now someone has something to say. Communication goes through the work itself rather than a separate channel, and a note that waits to be read is preferred over a message that interrupts.
Leave a mark in place — Annotation · optional
Let the actor leave a mark where it applies, read when others get there, instead of interrupting them. Skip this where each item is already the unit of discussion, such as an issue, a card, or a message; the thread then attaches to the whole item.
Attach the discussion to its place — Commenting
Turn the mark into a thread others can answer, kept beside its place in the work rather than inside it. Let threads be resolved, or the discussion only grows. Assigning a thread to someone is the handoff step at the scale of a comment.
Use set forms for recurring reports — Status feedback
Give recurring reports, such as an item's state, a session summary, or a review's conclusion, a small shared set of forms, so the sender does not have to write them and the reader does not have to interpret them. Anything a colleague must see now goes out as a notification instead.
Working apart and returning
Applies when
Sometimes shared work needs to be private for a while: a rough draft without watchers, a large change tried without disturbing others, or a stretch offline. This is the reviewed end of the earlier decision made workable: people may work apart, and owe a return.
Allow working apart — Draft and publish
Separate the working copy from what others read, with a deliberate act that moves one into the other: for the whole piece, such as a draft or a branch, or per change, such as a suggestion held for review. Each publish is a named version the history can keep. Working apart creates a return, which the next two steps handle.
Review the returning changes — Change review, its person-to-person face
Show what comes back as changes, what was there and what would replace it, and let the reviewer accept or reject them at the level the parting chose. Record the conclusion in the set report forms.
Resolve conflicting changes — Reconciliation
Where both sides changed the same thing, merge what can be merged and hold back the rest until a person picks between versions shown side by side. Show this only when deliberate parting returns. On live work, edits merge silently, and a conflict appearing mid-flow means the live-or-reviewed decision was wrong for that kind of work.
Passing work on
Applies when
The work has to continue with someone else, at a set point in a workflow or informally. What passes is responsibility as well as the work itself. This happens at each transfer, whether or not anyone worked apart.
Pass the work on with its context — Handoff, its person-to-person face · optional
Make the transfer an object, not only a message: a link into the work, a named responsibility such as review, resolve, or complete, and a subscription that keeps the recipient informed until the responsibility is done or explicitly given up. The sender is owed a view of whether it was received, reviewed, and acted on, which the next step provides. Skip this where the organisation already handles the transfer outside the tool.
Answer the handoff openly — Status feedback, its typed-answer shape
Let the recipient answer in the same set forms the reports use, such as accepted, done, declined, or changes requested, shown where the transfer lives, so neither side has to assume the other is watching.
Leaves: Responsibility moves with its context and is answered openly. Work continues with the next person instead of restarting, and nobody holds work without knowing it.
Connections
Calls Calibrating reliance
At Seeing each other, step 1, via Provenance marking
a machine contributor's signed output is an AI surface in shared work, where that sequence's checks apply and mixed authorship makes the signature matter most
Hands off to Attention and tempo
At Contributing in place, step 3, via Notification
a mention, a reply, or a change to someone's item is an interruption that sequence grades, and scheduled send is the same decision from the sender's side
Hands off to Memory and continuity
At Working apart and returning, step 1
each publish is a named version, and the history of working apart feeds that sequence's named states
Hands off to Making changes
At Working apart and returning, step 3, via Undo
the version not picked when resolving a conflict is a deletion, and recovering it belongs to that sequence's safety steps
Hands off to Attention and tempo
At Passing work on, step 1, via Notification
an assignment or review request claims a colleague's attention directly