Open Source, Collaborative Authoring
With a background in education I’ve been interested in a number of blogs and articles that have come up over the past few months regarding ‘open source collaboration’ for instructional material. Anyone who has used a wiki knows the general idea: ubiquitous, collaborative authoring by motivated experts un-encumbered by geographic location or commercial constraints. In some areas, though, a wiki is a very poor choice. Its egalitarian nature, informality and generally more limited formatting becomes the other edge of the sword. The ‘heat/light’ ratio changes and users lose confidence in the quality of information.
Beyond the hype of open source (Free software! No vendors!) lies the real beauty – altruism and belief that information should be shared. There are some amazing projects by universities to enable professors and industry experts to collaborate on curricula for a wide range of disciplines, from electrical engineering through to agriculture husbandry. A baseline of material was provided and users can contribute, extend and filter to meet their needs. Schools and universities are then free to incorporate this curricula into their own programmes.
Here at Author-it we have a large community of intelligent users that have taken the core Author-it software and solved some very complex problems. We get to hear about it but the information often stays locked inside peoples’ heads or drifts around the user community as anecdotes and rumour. So, in keeping with the spirit of open source we have made the (very purple) ‘Using Author-it’ guide available as an open source project. Our own product Author-it Live provides the ubiquitous, collaborative authoring interface via a standard web browser, to anyone, anywhere. With our long experience in the documentation and publishing industry we believe quality and accuracy are critical and shouldn’t be sacrificed just to get web-based collaboration. Author-it Live’s controlled workflow ensures that all articles go through peer-review before being made ‘live’.
At this early stage a small group of users will be contributing articles, and this community will grow. The evolving ‘Using Author-it’ guide will be made available online, and for the old school ‘curl up on the couch with a cup of tea’ people, a regular update to the hard copy will be found on Amazon. (update – the ‘Using Author-it’ guide has sold out already, sorry. More copies on their way to Amazon’s warehouse early next week)
I’d be interested in feedback from readers about the strengths, weaknesses, joys and disappointments of your own open collaborative efforts…
Posted by Matt Armstrong, Sales Director Asia Pacific, Author-it Software Corporation
Hi Matt – Here’s hoping my blog at Just Write Click is one of the ones you follow.
The model you describe for the Using Author-it guide sounds similar to the model that FLOSS Manuals follows for book production. TWiki is the back-end but it is much more than a wiki because of the book features it includes. We maintain a “Write” area as well as a “Read” area, and content is vetted before it goes into the Read area and before it is published to a pretty-print PDF, uploaded to Lulu, and eventually listed on Amazon. I think this collaborative model works well and is one many technical publishing groups could use. FLOSS Manuals specifically works with open source projects, creating free documentation for free software. That’s free as in freedom, although you can always download and remix the content for free as in no cost.
I’ll be talking about climbing the levels of collaboration at the STC Summit in May, and one of the case studies is FLOSS Manuals and the Book Sprint model we’ve been experimenting with. A Book Sprint is an in person event to collaboratively write a book in about a week’s time. We just completed a Firefox book in 2 days time at the DocTrain West conference and included remote collaborators as well. My experiences with collaborative authoring have definitely made me seek out opportunities to do so again.
I’m always on the lookout for ways to open up a collaborative authoring environment – I’d love to learn more details about how you’re recruiting and inviting authors as well as prioritizing and quality checking the work.
Comment by Anne Gentle — March 25, 2009 @ 12:08 am
Hi Anne,
Yes, your blog is one that I follow and in fact your FLOSS articles helped sow the seeds for this project. Author-it Live is a great platform for collaboration and we decided to put our money where our mouth is and start using it the same way some of our clients are – include external contributors and reviewers. The interface is a lot more like Author-it than a standard wiki, though: dragging/dropping, Xtend, embedding, variants, and access to the CMS. Essentially the “Book Editor” in a browser.
We’re currently taking a slowly slowly approach to inviting contributors as this is a new area for us. We talk to each contributor about the project and answer questions about how they can be involved and what concerns they might have. We will likely sub-edit just for accuracy – thankfully most Author-it users are professional writers!
But, for anyone who would like to contribute just drop me an email and we can set up an account.
Comment by Matt Armstrong — March 29, 2009 @ 3:23 pm
My business partner and I need to create a reasonably complex set of documents working as a team. We are 300 miles apart by car. How would you suggest that we support our effort with tools.
We plan to use a revision control tool like subversion to store the manuscript masters. I write this hoping that you might suggest some web server based collaborative writing suite.
Thanks,
~~~ 0;-Dan
Comment by Dan Saint-Andre — December 10, 2009 @ 10:32 pm