Where you and a colleague disagree

On a page with other people on it, Smoke looks for the places you are working from different facts — and shows them above the list, with the lines that evidence them.

Six kinds:

• Contradiction — two lines assert things that cannot both be true
• Ownership — you are each carrying the same work, or each expecting the other to
• Status — one line calls something finished and another treats it as live
• Pattern — the same disagreement in three or more places
• Drift — the work has moved away from what the page’s goals say it is for
• Priority — you order the same work differently

What it takes

Two lines, written by two different people. One person’s two lines are one person changing their mind, which is not a disagreement and is theirs to resolve. This is enforced rather than asked for: a finding that rests on one author’s lines is dropped before you ever see it.

That is also why you will see none of these on your own page, and none on a page nobody else has written on yet.

Filed under a goal

On a 1:1 or a Team page, a disagreement is filed under the goal it works against where there plainly is one. Where there is not, it stands on its own — which is a real answer, not a gap.

Putting one down

Press got it and it goes. It comes back if one of the lines it rests on changes, because then it is about something new — and the edit may well have been what resolved it.

Most pages have none

The bar is that you can point at the two lines and see the disagreement without being persuaded of it. Smoke is told that most pages have nothing, and it usually agrees.