Donna started from a simple idea: each matter should have one place. Everyone who belongs to the work, including the lawyer, the client and the other professionals involved, sees the same Space, live. This post describes the engineering underneath that idea, because keeping a Space live for everyone takes deliberate architecture.
One Connection per Person
Realtime features are often added one at a time, each with its own channel. That works in a demo but causes problems in daily use. Connections multiply, phone batteries drain, and features update at noticeably different speeds, which makes the product feel uneven.
So Donna holds exactly one realtime connection per person, and everything travels over it: presence, document processing progress, typing indicators, messages, task and timeline changes, and notifications. If you change your profile photo, every screen where your avatar appears repaints in under a second, for everyone in the Space. That happens because identity updates are simply another kind of event on the same bus.
Presence as Live Identity
Presence in Donna is a live identity layer, and it does more than put a green dot on a page. It tracks who is in the Space, which document they have open, where their cursor sits in a draft and which cell they occupy in a spreadsheet. Because one layer answers all of these questions, a colleague’s caret in a contract draft is the same colour as their avatar in the header and their chip in the sheet. Each person has one identity, shown consistently wherever they appear.
Co-Editing Without Lost Work
Documents and spreadsheets in a Space are collaborative, and collaboration is where realtime systems most often fail. Two people type in the same paragraph, or an AI edit lands while someone is halfway through a cell, and one person’s work is lost. We use conflict-free data structures for both surfaces. Every edit merges with the others, so concurrent changes interleave and nothing is overwritten.
- Drafting supports live multi-caret editing. Word-style tracked changes appear as you type and are attributed to the right person, even across reloads.
- Spreadsheets merge edits from several people at once. Cell edits, formulas and formatting all merge. AI edits enter through the same operation stream as human ones, so an approval applies cleanly on top of live co-editing.
- Recovery is built in. When a connection drops, Donna replays what was missed. A screen that has fallen behind catches up from the Space instead of relying on its own memory.
In typical use, an edit, a message or a profile change reaches every open screen in the Space in under a second.
Permissions on Every Event
Moving updates quickly is only part of the problem in a shared Space. The harder part is making sure they never reach the wrong people. Every event on the bus is authorised against the Space’s permission model before delivery. A client sees the matter’s shared surface and none of the firm’s internal notes. Someone given access to one document sees that document and nothing else in the file. The same rules apply when Donna retrieves information, so its answers are computed only from what the person asking is entitled to read. Put differently, permissions are checked at every layer where data moves.
Where This Leaves Us
Each individual feature here exists in other products: presence in design tools, live co-editing in note apps, realtime dashboards in project trackers. A legal matter needs all of it in one permissioned place. Without that, the matter fragments back into email. So when we say one Space per matter, we are describing the architecture, and the architecture is what keeps the idea true on settlement day, when everyone is working in the Space at once.