Reviewing the options below, can you speak to what solutions your own organization or the organizations that you work with in the Global South use to address these needs? Are there solutions that are particularly well-suited that we should be looking into? Are there solutions that we should avoid? And, if so, why?
To date, Beautiful Trouble has used Google Docs intensively and exclusively for colalborative document editing. For many reasons, we are currently exploring other options for Beautiful Rising.
The minimum requirements for the project's needs in this category are:
- Enable many individuals to contribute to a single document
- Contributing should be easy
- Sharing the document with contributors should be easy
- Revision history / compare versions
The "would be nice" requirements are:
- Internal "comments" between the people working on the document
- Offline access
- Suggest changs (vs. editing directly)
- Anonymous edits / privacy options
Initial document loading will include:
- 4-5 templates (tactics, theories, principles, case studies)
- 10 modules transfered to Beautiful Rising editing format
- A long list (~50) of Beautiful Trouble modules that could be used in Beautiful Rising
Also, Anna Levy said:
For advocates and activists in the Global South, it's important for these shared doc options (not necessarily for us) to have multi-platform contribution options. I.e., people can send in SMS and contribute to docs in progress. It doesn't need to be SMS specific, but assuming that service areas will be shaky, it would be interesting to have options for sharing into a doc without opening a computer or smartphone.
For the initial in-country session in Burma/Myanmar, we have decided to pilot a collaborative document-editing solution on top of plain-text Markdown files and Github. We believe that this combination will provide the in-country session participants with:
- Low-tech, offline-friendly ways to access templates and example documents
- A privacy-enhancing environment, where no web services or log-ins are required to contribute
Additionally, it will enable session facilitators to:
- Travel with the documents on a USB key
- Work on the documents offline / without access to the Internet
More broadly, we believe that "working in the open" on Github will benefit the project and the larger community. Documents hosted on Github are publicly avaialble without requiring registration (we will provide direction on how to access them anonymously) and can be easily shared and improved.
As we move from the in-country session work to the curation and co-editing work, we will endeavour to improve existing tools (like those listed below) to make the editing, reviewing, and submission experiences as non-technical and user-friendly as possible.
If you have questions, comments, or suggestions on the above, please let us know.
Markdown text documents on Github (like this very document).
- Pretty darn simple to use 👍
- Possibly less intuitive for those familiar with other tools 👎
Who to talk to:
- @phillipadsmith
- @auremoser
Prose provides a beatifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. It's a web-based interface for managing content on GitHub. Use it to create, edit, and delete files, and save your changes directly to GitHub. http://prose.io/#about
A tool for facilitating the redlining of documents with the GitHub uninitiated https://github.com/benbalter/redliner
Etherpad is a highly customizable Open Source online editor providing collaborative editing in really real-time. http://etherpad.org
- Open source 👍
- Privacy-enhancing 👍
- Pretty darn easy to use 👍
- Limited formatting options 👎
- Not sure if it's possible to "comment" on a doc per se ❓
Who to talk to:
- @phillipadsmith
- @auremoser
In-browser markdown editor
This is actually quite interesting:
- Markdown editor with support to save the file almost anywhere. 👍
- Open source, lots of plugins. 👍
- No version history support yet 👎
Who to talk to: *
WebODF: work with your office files in the cloud, on the desktop and on your mobile
From Ross:
What we're looking to for real document editing is webodf http://webodf.org/. Owncloud has implemented this in recent versions, and it looks extremely promising.
Skype and Hangouts alternative http://blog.etherpad.org/2014/04/13/skype-and-google-hangouts-alternative/ https://v.etherpad.org/
Same as above, and:
- Video/audio stream + document editing 👍
- Video option not currently ready for primetime 👎
Who to talk to:
- Whole Beautiful Rising team. Big #Fail
Every GitHub repository comes equipped with a section for hosting documentation, called a wiki. https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-wikis/
- Integrated with Github 👍
- Visual editor 👍
- Wiki stuff 👍
- Wiki stuff 👎
Who to talk to:
- @phillipadsmith for Bricolage
Gollum provides an offline editing interface in the browser to a Github Wiki https://github.com/gollum/gollum
- Integrated with Github 👍
- Visual editor 👍
- Offline editing 👍
- Wiki stuff 👍
- Wiki stuff 👎
Who to talk to:
- @phillipadsmith for Bricolage
DokuWiki has many features but all of them are easy to use. And many more can be added through the free plugin downloads. https://www.dokuwiki.org
- Wiki stuff 👍
- Wiki stuff 👎
Quip is a beautiful mobile productivity suite that enables you to collaborate on any device. Quip combines chat, documents, spreadsheets, checklists, and more in a simple and elegant interface that makes collaboration easy. https://quip.com/
- Not Google 👍
- Requires Google account/login 👎
- Works really well offline 👍
- Works really well on smartphones 👍
- Has comments, mentions, to-do lists, and so on 👍
Who to talk to:
- @daveomitchell & @phillipadsmith have experimented. Requirement of a Google account/login was a surprise and we've stopped experimenting with Quip for now.
###Google Docs With Google Docs, you can write, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. For free. http://www.google.com/docs/about/
- Requires a Google account/login for editing ❓
- Privacy situation unknown ❓:
- Has all the features editors expect 👍
- Has integration with other Google services 👍 👎 (for privacy)
Who to talk to:
- Just about everyone!