Close enough

The issue of designing a collaborative task manager needs to also take into account real data from previous experiments where collaborative behavior took place. One of the issue is the sizing of the application. Soon into our experiment (in 2002), we jokingly came up with the DC law that stated that the size of the conversation threads between collaborating parties was 1/1000 th the size of the documents attached to these conversation threads. As of today, four years later, the size of the "library" of documents is 22.17 GB. The size of the conversation threads is 18.66 MB. Close enough. This is somewhat amazing that the "law" still holds. Indeed, in a matter of four years, new formats have appeared in the archives: MPEGs or very large JPEGs, yet the scaling still holds.

The Davalos-Carron's Law or the DC Law.

Our internal application provides a way of tracking action items evolution within our organization and also serves as a repository of documents exchanged between different parties (internal and external). In other words, one part of this application could be considered the equivalent of all E-mails/Messenger discussions minus the attachments, the other part of the application could be considered as the union of all E-mail attachments, hardrives in the company as well as the ftp and internal web sites (intranet.) Over the past three years, we have found a simple relationship between the amount of information data in the first part (text of E-mail/messenger discussions) posted to the application and the data in the second part (attachments of E-mails/ftp sites/internal library...). The second part of the information is a thousand times bigger that the first one. This really means that when Google proposes 1 GB E-mail storage, it should be equivalent to about 1MB of E-mails without attachments. Since most E-mails are not more than say about 300 Bytes each plus headers (an E-mail is then about 1 to 2 Kb large), there is a great chance that the google E-mail average user account will not contain more than a 1,000 E-mails on average. The main reason we think it follows this law is really because the user is told that there is no memory limit which could be considered the case with the new Gmail service of Google (as opposed to storage limits on yahoo and hotmail). In case of memory limit, the user occasionaly purges her/his system by removing the bigger items first and therefore compresses this ratio between light threads/communication and documentation (self generated movies and audios, presentations, ...)