[Design] What is the purpose of the All collection?

[Alec Flett]

Mimi Yin wrote:
> Agreed, I think I'm just having an allergic reaction to having an 
> extra Dashboard collection. Would 'All' include NOW and LATER items as 
> well? I think it should, otherwise Search might get really frustrating.
>
Yes, but here's a thing to know about searching: (at least today) our 
repository keeps all items in one big "soup" and searching the entire 
soup for something is actually easier than trying to limit that search 
to ONLY items in a particular collection. When the user wants to "search 
all items for 'staff meeting' - what PyLucene is doing is searching ALL 
items in the repository. If the user wants to "search all items in the 
'All' collection for 'staff meeting' then PyLucene searches ALL items in 
the repository, and then filters out items that aren't in the 'All' 
collection.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: search is independent of collection 
structure.  'All' need not contain 'Now' and 'Later' items for search to 
find those items.

> If that's the case, then we're talking about having 2 Collections that 
> would look very similar:
>
> 1. 'All' contains NOW, LATER and DONE
> 2. 'Dashboard' contains only NOW or NOW and LATER
>
Potentially yes. Another way to think about it might be that 'All' 
exists somewhere other than the sidebar - maybe not in the general list 
of collections, but in some other visual space. I would actually argue 
that a full-on 'All' collection is not really that useful. I think that 
if people are really buying into the faceted views of their items, they 
will spend little to no time in a true 'All' collection.

Now, that's not to say we shouldn't have such a thing, but maybe it 
isn't as much of a first-class collection as the Dashboard is? Everyone 
will want to get to it at SOME point but most of the time they'll be in 
the Dashboard and their Mine collections... so in my mind, "All" == 
"Archives"

Alec