File-based collaboration creates problems of versioning and merging edits from different co-authors.
Versioning in file-based collaboration does not suffer from the fishbowl effect. They work well for people writing alone, but have the downside of requiring manual version management when collaborating with others.
Reviewing changes
Carefully reviewing a document is important in many professional contexts, but existing software makes it difficult to visualize and review the changes that have been made to a document.
Layers and drafts
An Upwelling document is always edited within a layer. We call unmerged layers “drafts”.
An Upwelling document can have multiple drafts at the same time, all of which are separate from each other: edits made in one draft do not appear in other drafts. As such, a writer who needs a private space can create a new draft and work there in solitude.
When the draft is ready, it is merged onto the stack:
The stack captures the full editing history of the document, starting from the moment it was created as an empty document, and each merged layer represents a batch of changes relative to the previous (lower) layer.
All drafts float on top of the stack of merged layers; when one draft is merged, all other drafts are updated to include the changes in the merged layer. Using a Git analogy, every time a branch is merged into main, all other branches are automatically rebased on top of the latest main:
