We are looking forward to live editing within Confluence. In order to support group editing of meeting notes during our public forums, where anyone around the world may join and we want to encourage everyone to help edit the notes, we'd like to have the option to put the page into an "edit by default" state while the meeting is taking place. Rather than requiring everyone to navigate to the meeting notes and be brave & motivated enough to hit an edit button, we would appreciate the option, while the notes are being taken, for users who navigate to the page (assuming they have edit privileges) to start in the collaborative live editing mode.

One of the powers of etherpad (and Google Docs) for community note-taking is people are instantly in edit mode as soon as they navigate to the page. While clicking an edit button may seem trivial, it can represent a real barrier to getting contributions from those who have never edited a wiki page before, are new to the community and uncertain if they should be editing the page, or regular attendees only partially engaged in the meeting.

So, as live editing comes to Confluence, please consider adding an "edit by default" option for pages being actively edited by others. This could be implemented as a general configuration option (e.g., "When live editing, newcomers join live editing automatically") and/or a page-specific option (e.g., "Newcomers join live edit automatically" checkbox somewhere near the "Invite others" link).