Loose Consistency

Observations from the MICE project of people using a shared whiteboard (wb) in conjunction with an audio tool lead us to conclude that the users of such tools will happily tolerate temporary inconsistencies between the view of a document at one site and the view of it at another, so long as eventual consistency is achieved and so long as the time they have to wait is predictable. This is fortunate as the requirements of resilience and scalability dictate that total consistency of view is not possible unless mechanisms requiring unacceptable delays are employed.