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

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.

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.