Collaborative notebook sessions

[brianmajor]

This is a feature request from a 2022 ADASS attendee.

I would like the ability to simultaneously work on a Jupyter Notebook with one or more colleagues. Specifically:

• I would like to initiate "collaborative" sessions with identified individuals. Each individual should have their own access URL so that the individual sessions have the correct identify and thus correct file permissions.
• I would like changes that collaborators make to show up in the sessions of each member of the collaboration.

The session URLs for the non-initiating user must be distributed, perhaps by email.

[sfabbro]

We experimented with the astroml-notebook a while back, and this was quite useful, but also it was quite open.

Maybe we could add an option on the launching API to add collaborative without the user's need to modify the startup script. Also there is a need to investigate the options to limit what files can be authorised to be accessed from the collaborators, as back then, it would be all files the sharing user had access to.

[brianmajor]

I was thinking about a solution with separate lab containers but with the same images and .ipynb path. But perhaps a shared container is an option, especially now that I know about that --collaborative flag. But that does indeed make identity within the container difficult. Maybe like you suggest a limit to a portion of the file system or a single .ipynb file.