The First Version Was Wrong
OpenSpace v0.1 looked like every other collaborative tool on the market. It had a sidebar, a main content area, and a list of people. It was correct in every obvious way and wrong in every interesting one.
The core problem: we had designed a tool for sharing documents, when what teams actually need is a tool for sharing context. Those are very different problems.
Designing for Context, Not Content
The breakthrough came when one of our designers asked a simple question: "what does a team actually need to see to make a good decision together?" The answer wasn't "a document." It was a combination of information, history, and relationship — context.
OpenSpace v2 was built around this insight. The primary unit of organization isn't a file or a channel — it's a workspace, which holds all three things together.
What Shipped
The version we shipped still has a sidebar. Some things are just ergonomic. But the logic underneath — the way information flows, the way history is preserved, the way context is surfaced at the right moment — is completely different from what we started with. That's what took 14 revisions.