nheeren
commented
6 years ago Hi @tmillross. I think you have a good point and I it would be nice to identify and recommend a workflow for the future. I am a huge fan of markdown and almost exclusively use it for my own writing these days. Nevertheless, there are a number of shortcomings when it comes to collaborative writing and I am not sure how to overcome those.
- For instance, we often need to discuss specific sections or even the choice of an individual word. Having such a discussion in commit messages in a, say, 20-page document seems cumbersome to me.
- Another thing that often bothers me with GitHub in general is that it may make it difficult to include everybody in the workflow. For instance, I know professors that refuse to work on anything else than MS Word documents. While such people may be convinced to give Google Docs a try, I don't see them fiddling with commits, etc.
For the document in question, i.e. "the manifesto", I would strongly vote for not migrating now, as we are already struggling with the workflow and I intend to finalise the document this week.
ricklupton
tmillross
Morning all, When we view the in-progress Manifesto as described in #7 , we're greeted by a page of multi-coloured text, highlighted comments, text-strikethroughs, paragraph markers, and comments which extend past the final page! Might an alternative collaborative writing approach be useful for our requirements? I'd like to make a suggestion regarding the document writing process used by the group, to collectively draft documents or similar artefacts in the future. We could use a similar development model to those we use for our codebases. The Open Science Github root directory or a sub-folder would include a text document which adheres to a standard we agree to. For instance a Markdown .md file, to handle our (fairly minimal) formatting requirements. Brief contributing guidelines would be drafted to describe what's expected from contributors. Those that are comfortable editing the repository files on their local machine could use their typical development workflow. Those that prefer a web-based GUI could rather use the friendly and accessible Github file editor, which is almost as easy as editing a Google doc, but has the benefits of commit messages etc. As I'm preaching to the choir here, I suspect most of you can recognise the advantages this may bring over the Google-docs approach! Please comment also if that's not the case, or if you'd like to discuss and evaluate more comprehensively the pros and cons of collaboration alternatives. If this idea is supported, and if the Manifesto is not yet at completion, we could implement the process without too much effort for even for this current document. We'd lose the editing history that Google maintains. But would gain improved traceability, discussion, and efficiency improvements for any future edits. I finish by quoting this evangelical blog post and look forward to hearing your thoughts.