That is the first thing I tried. My initial thought was to create 1 object as you suggested and pass it around, with both views having access to it and essentially communicating through it.

What I found though was that the object/hash being changed in one place, did not change the other. So I concluded that it must be copying the object/hash (at the same time, the same one) for use in each view, rather than passing a reference to the same object.

To work around this, I used atom.emit and atom.on, but if this could work it would be cleaner