A Brief Description of lily

What is lily?

The lily project is, in its simplest form, an attempt to create a real-time, interactive, computer mediated communication tool (usually abreviated in most lily documentation as a CMC) which is focused on interpersonal communication. While there have been many approaches to this in the past, lily attempts to borrow some key features from each one, and avoid some of the deficiencies and problems from each:

Various MOO and MUD systems
- The emphasis has been on role-playing and construction, not communiation.
- The "virtual world" communication is an option in lily, since it provides a good communication method for many conversations
- MOOs are best for their flexibility
IRC
- Multiple servers are a powerful tool, since worldwide communication is an extension of lily's goals.
- With this size - information overload is a major concern that lily actively sought to eliminate.
- User authentication has always been a problem in IRC.
CONNECT and Clover
- These systems provided the examples for efficient and professional person-to-person and group communication.
- A concentration on a server to support a community (usually geographically located).
- Limitations on naming and identifing people or groups has always been a problem.

What is the goal of lily?

First and foremost, lily is designed to improve online, real-time, communication between individuals and groups of people. This communication can be professional or recreational - and lily must support both without interfering with the other.

Equally important, it has the secondary goal of being flexible enough to adapt and experiment with a wide variety of methods and formats for communication.

How will lily acomplish these goals?

By trying to meet the communication needs of a wide variety of users, while maintaining a professional appearance, lily works to bring itself into the world of available production CMCs. There are several features built-in, or that will be built-in, as the core features of lily:

Both private and public messages are part of the sytem. Private messages may be to groups, and public messages are to discussions.
People may be a memeber of one, many, or no discussions.
Messages are the most important activity, therefore sending messages should be the easiest action on the system.
Signaling and notifications are available for a variety of actions by people and discussions. Signals and notifications may be turned off to reduce information overload.
All messages are authenticated from an account, but that account is always anonymous.
Because of this authentication with anonymity, it is possible to automatically ignore messages and actions from a particular user.
Communicating with people on the same server is the most important activity, therefore this should be easiest to accomplish, but communicating with people and discussions on other servers should be possible using the same methods as on one's default server.
The underlying structure should be public, easy to understand, easy to modify, and should support a wide variety of ways to accept input and display output. The lily developers encourage extensions to the code.

The lily CMC / webmaster@lily.org / 2 Mar 1996