Limitations of Git and GitHub for writers and teams

[aesmithwriting]

Janis - these are my notes from our Slack chat. Want to take a look and edit?:

Limitations of Git and GitHub for writers and teams

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Learning curve - Google docs is familiar. easy to use, not particularly powerful but don't have to battle for adoption.

herding cats - in terms of technical aspects (getting people to learn GitHub) and content strategy, getting people to adopt new way of doing things is significant obstacle.

There has to be organizational will to make people do right thing

Git - drives arguments that have to happen but don't tend to happen. prevents people from deferring cost of version control. some orgs like kicking can down road indefinitely. version control - prevents you getting to that point where you kick the can down the road too far

learning curve formalizes informal workarounds that people have for doing these things. difficulty: makes accounting of costs easy. costs easy to see; benefits are there not as obvious as startup costs. the cost of learning

if doing this a lot, you can't avoid costs of having to deal with revision control

break even point - 5-10 people. can't do it w/out some sort of content management or revision control system. internal quality is not tradeable for cost in the way external quality is. external quality enables efficiency and productivity.

[shuttle1987]

Definitely agree that the learning curve is a very substantial obstacle for introducing new techniques like this. Generally speaking people tend to underestimate the benefits of things like version control for a few reasons:

• Workarounds may be "good enough" already
• The cost of workarounds is not accounted for and comes in dribs-and-drabs
• the upside of paradigms you don't understand is hard to estimate while the time investment is easy to estimate. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZBViI8ZaU0 good talk from Ken Stanley about this phenomena)

[shuttle1987]

A link for the "internal quality not tradeable for cost": https://martinfowler.com/bliki/TradableQualityHypothesis.html

[shuttle1987]

There might be a way to work around the lack of live editing with http://subethaedit.net/ but it doesn't fit nicely with the Git workflow most likely.

[aesmithwriting]

Some teams don't use version control at all. In some cases people are concerned they won't get back their investment in time. If just a casual every now and then user - it is a bit of a thing to pick up. If dev, expected to learn version control system for any respectable company. Without vresion control, too many other problems present themselves that are unresolvable. Have that confidence of being able to roll things forward and backward - like having a typewriter vs. Word. Undo and Redo buttons. There's a lot of churn in technology - this is not one of those. Figure they'll waste 6 months on it and forget about it. Like the difference between learning a word processor vs. content writing. If you thought Git was a transient tech choice, learning curve would be hard-pressed to see this as being worthwhile. Version control - cornerstone for being able to coordinate efficiently. Can get by with other tools but not having them is crippling. Once you get used to using them, you realize how essential they are. ie learning to read and write in modern world is important. It's a concept, not a technology. Because it's conceptual, there's a mismatch between concept and tech. Important part isn't Git - command line terrible, usability still terrible, derided as user hostile, one of worst user interfaces in world, used to be worse. You can't coordinate a group of people via email. Git and Mecurial have a core workflow driven by thinking about how do we solve this issue of multiple people collaborating on the same document? You can have a history of changes like Undo and Redo. where with Word once you undo something it's gone forever. There's a whole set of communications that go on about writing or design that occur about the document but outside the document itself (out of band). Comments in margins rather than a letter between two people. More than one person, conversation flows start getting hard to keep track of.

Accountability factor for team members - track who did what, when