Howdy, this is Markdown plus Git for collaborative writing on August 24th, 2023.
There's a HackMD, I think maybe you can see the HackMD link in the chat.
You've probably also got it in email.
The YouTube link in chat is to the last session.
And we're kind of scheduled for an hour today to the top of the hour.
And so depending on how many people show up, we might actually get more done, I guess.
But the main thing is to figure out who's going to keep meeting, like, and what are
those meetings going to be like?
And why we would be meeting.
So I think the best reason to keep meeting is either to be learning Git and Markdown
or maybe even better to be learning Git and Markdown on a collaborative project.
Maybe a little toy project to start off with, one that we can work on without stressing
too much about what the content is and then end up with something that we might be able
to turn it into something useful.
We might kind of just put it on the shelf and go, "Okay, that was a lot of fun."
Another good outcome after that practice of doing something together would be to kind
of review recap after action review where we got to.
Howdy, Kiel, is that how am I gonna unmute? Hi, it's Kyle. Good morning. Hi Kyle, good
morning. Hi Kyle. Good morning. So just to recap real quick, I would be happy if we
got out of this call, kind of knowing who's going to continue doing this call and why
and how, basically. So maybe we should go around and talk about what we would like to
get out of this exercise, these exercises. Ray, I'm going to pick on you and have you
go first if that's okay, because you kind of kicked this off, and I know that you've
got stuff that you want to get done and maybe get in Markdown as a tool to do it.
Yes. So thank you. So what interested me in this is the collaborative aspect of it, which
comes in, I guess, two versions. One is that it's a good way to share thoughts that I have
for the beginnings of a white paper that some people have read it and decided that it was
really dense and difficult and they had to read it a few times to understand.
So I want people to actually help write it, to give people to better understand it and
also have contributors to shape the ideas and improve it.
related to this same project, it's going to make sense to put together a deck.
And I, although you've cautioned against this, what I really would like to do is see people
collaborate with trying to do the skeleton of a deck in Markdown as well before moving
into some sort of final format for the output
to actually be able to deliver a presentation.
I have a third motivation beyond that,
which is that although in the past I've written code,
it stopped quite a while ago.
And so I've never worked with Git at all.
It just wasn't part of my experience.
And so for me to understand the workflows
would remove another thing from me being able to jump in
and actually contribute to code
because I would know that practice.
Think you're muted.
- Yes, I am.
Thanks, Ray.
I am going to share my screen and let's say I'm recording already.
It's recording in this tab.
I'm going to share my screen on the markdown thing and then in my Jitsi tab I've got to
to make sure to select the screen share.
Otherwise, it won't record very well.
I'm not convinced this is recording well,
but it's a little better than nothing.
OK, I think it's kind of set.
Thanks for bearing with me in Jitsi
and recording and screen sharing.
So line 19, in a more perfect world,
we would have kind of collectively grabbed Ray's nicely
set up points there.
Let's go back and do it together.
So Ray wants to expand from single-player writing
to multiplayer.
Ray and I guess everybody, one of the ways that we say collaborative writing is to call
it multiplayer.
And part of the reason is to express ideas better for a wider audience.
And then another thing, I feel like there was, Rafe, if you could help me a little bit,
The next thing was working on a particular project.
Was that it?
- Yes, but even before that,
to express the ideas better,
I would say to possibly to add ideas from others.
- I'm gonna say more people instead of others,
if that's okay.
And I'm going to make a temporary line here and then I'm going to put your last thing, which I also remember.
So then I feel like line 22, you had a specific project you were kind of in mind.
You didn't really talk about it much, but I think that's kind of what...
I heard that. Maybe I'm wrong.
Yes. So I have a specific project in mind and I'm interested in
doing multiplayer writing around both the white paper and the presentation for it.
Yep.
Okay. Thanks for that. I'm going to go ahead and close this out. I'm going to go ahead
Okay.
Thanks for that.
Who wants to go next?
Who wants to go next?
I'll go.
Thanks, Kyle.
So Ray invited me to learn more about this, which I found interesting and exciting.
My background is in technology since the 80s, so I've always worked with developers.
And then in the 90s, I had a software publishing company, publishing games, utilities, lifestyle software.
and then I had an interactive agency, and I've worked in recent years a lot for big
technology companies and in between a lot of other stuff, FinTech, a lot of SaaS platform,
and worked closely with developers most of my career.
So anything that gets me to understand better the way that they work and to be able to work
through more dynamically with them in those flows is interesting to me.
When I was with Palo Alto Networks last year, I was working a lot on code to cloud marketing
strategy.
So, you know, GitHub is a big place where problems occur there.
So Git is top of mind for me.
And I'm currently working on a SaaS platform ag tech project within an agency.
And so I'm working again with developers.
So it just seems to make sense to me, along with the training I'm doing for
chat GPT, I think this type of thinking aligns really well with learning,
prompting, and all kinds of things, including learning to code,
which is the next step in chat GPT.
So I don't know how to summarize that more, but
So there's a lot of things that align and are interesting to me about this.
From that perspective.
I especially noticed when I worked for these big tech companies, instead of directly for smaller startups where I would meet with the development team,
which is often dozens of programmers, on how a product works or how a platform works.
The bigger companies, you get really siloed.
So anything that helps me better understand the developer side,
I think, is really powerful.
Cool.
So line 25 through 29, does that kind of capture pretty well?
Yes, thank you.
Great.
And I especially like what's on line 29 that you've got.
I think I'm teaching people how to use Chat GPT.
And one of the observations I've got
is that working with Chat GPT is kind of a low impact way
to learn how to think through how to explain something
and how to ask people something better.
You have a bot that's infinitely patient
and reasonably conversational
and you get a lot of practice.
And, okay, I'm trying to communicate something.
How can I break it down in a way
that gets the response I want?
And it's just a robot response
and it's either makes you happy or sad
that it's like, oh, well,
I didn't ask the question very well
It gave me an answer, a very interesting answer, but that's not the question I wanted.
So I've learned that I ask questions much better.
I had a doctor's appointment recently and I heard myself asking the questions after the session
with the doctor, the questions I asked were very much informed by how well I have gotten,
how much better I've gotten at asking questions and prompting, you know, people or bots.
It's very interesting.
And the other thing is, it's a,
the other thing that I can,
because I'm a developer and I know,
I have a kind of a cheat code to what development is.
It's pretty easy for me to go to chat2BT and get it to,
it's actually really good at writing code.
So I can go over and say, you know,
write the code that does this,
but I kind of know how to ask
and I kind of know what to do with the code once it's done.
So there's something where more people who will be using
chat GPT and whatever comes afterwards,
you kind of need the basics of how to code
and how to work with code.
Even if you don't really know how programming works,
you kind of have to know what's reasonable
and what you can ask and what you can't ask
and things like that.
So I really like that line 29, Kyle.
By the way, while we're at learning about coding and stuff like that, I think it was
Marvin Minsky back in the day.
He worked a lot, or Simon Papert, maybe.
They worked a lot on teaching.
There's a couple parts of coding.
One of them is boring learning of all the syntax and stuff like that.
And that's kind of maybe the poster child often for coding.
There's another thing which is breaking down problems into, you know, modules and being
able to instruct like a turtle, a drawing turtle or something like that, how to get
stuff done.
Understanding how to algorithmize things is actually, I think, a literacy that we need
more of.
And ChatGPD opens up the ability to actually act on, you know, that kind of knowledge with
a lot of force, a lot of capability. So, who's next? Butler, maybe?
I'll go next. Sure. You want to go first?
Yeah, I can go next. So, I'm tech savvy, but I'm not a coder and I'm not a developer, and
I am less interested in this conversation and how this all gets done,
then I've got some projects that want to use something like this maybe.
So would that be appropriate to talk about?
>> Yeah.
>> I'm going to seriously resist getting into the tech conversations here.
So let me just paste these in to the markdown.
There's three classes of projects I'm looking at.
They're going to just all go in at once, I guess.
Yeah.
That's real.
Yeah.
So one is co-writing, working with people
on developing proposals for white papers together.
We're doing that in Google Docs right now.
What you all are talking about here is something better
than Google Docs.
Yes.
That's number one.
Number two, two books I'm trying to put together.
One is a curated multi-author anthology.
And the idea would be for people to post their chapters
and then cross-comment on each other's chapters
and possibly do that in the open,
possibly behind a cloak to be revealed
once it's at a certain level of knowledge.
And the third is a book that I'm primary author of,
but I'm thinking about doing it in the open,
kind of serialized with comments and revisions
within either tightly curated
or wide open group of collaborators.
So I'm curious about whether what's under discussion here
provides appropriate platform for that.
Participation by people who are not coders,
who are just writers, thinkers, and want
it as simple as possible in terms of workflows.
Do not want to be able to look--
folks who don't need to open the hood and look at the engine,
but just get in the car and drive somewhere.
Thanks, Gil.
That's great.
Can we expand GTPR?
Yeah, sure.
These are-- this one is Getting the Prices Right.
This is about what I see as a fundamental mess
of the climate and environmental story, which is that the markets
lie.
And we don't pay the real prices of things.
And so I've got an outline for--
it's like a 15-essay book that dives
into the various aspects of that, both conceptually
and policy and so forth.
I'm ready for the next one.
Excuse me, you kind of dropped out for me there.
Yeah, tell me when you're ready for the next one.
Next one, go for it.
Yeah, so the SDSC is the structural defects
of Capitalism, which is a hyphenated word.
With a capital I, or--
No, I don't think so.
I think just like that.
I mean, maybe this, maybe, yeah.
I mean, yeah, let's just leave it as that for now.
So, do you want the summary of the book
or you want to just leave it?
- No, that's good.
As long as we kind of know it's a book
and maybe I guess a little bit the size of it
or something like that.
- Don't know the size of it yet.
I'm building the outline.
- Book is close enough.
If it's a blog post, that's one thing.
- No, it's not a blog post, it's a book.
And put book in quotes,
'cause the question I keep asking myself
whenever I think of these things is,
like book in quotes, but what if it's not a book?
- Yeah.
Let me put a note kind of down here at line 35.
And yeah, I wanted to also note that anybody can,
with the link in the chat, you can get to this thing.
You don't have to sign in and then these buttons on the upper left control the view.
The left two have the editing view on the side here.
Real quick, I wanted to take off on your book thing a little bit.
Jerry Mikulski and I and some other folks are working on something called Neo Books.
A number of people have talked about Wikibooks.
Most recently, Jordan.
Different people mean different things by Wikibooks.
But anyway, Jerry's thought a fair amount about Neo-books
and also has articulated, I think.
So if you poke through his brain,
you could probably find Neo-books.
And then a Neo-book is probably something
that might exist as an e-book,
maybe even as a printed book.
but it's probably also a website
and it's probably also a set of presentations.
It's probably also, you know, podcasts and videos
and all kinds of things, right?
So once you've got that,
the curated information narrativized,
then, you know, book is gonna mean something different
than it did 50 years ago.
And let me go, since we don't have too many people,
I can kind of get into a little detail
and go back over your points.
For co-writing, this can be better than Google Docs.
It can be worse.
But it gets better and better the longer the piece is.
So if you're writing a blog post,
you might use HackMD for a blog post.
You would not use Git.
Markdown is actually always a great thing
learn. It's used in a lot of places and it's good to know Markdown.
Yeah, and I'm doing my work primarily in Obsidian.
Yeah, so there you go.
And I'm assuming for the moment that it's going to be Obsidian to Obsidian publish
as the first layer, but who knows?
Yeah, so there's a thing that I stuck in here. There's a great article called
Writing Long Form Content with Obsidian on 54. There's a plugin now that kind of,
It's a little, it makes Obsidian kind of like Scrivener Lite, and you write separate pages
as chapters or whatever you want, and then there's a plugin, the long form plugin,
that will output the whole thing for you and output it in PDF or, you know, different formats.
I'm sorry, you put that in chat?
It's on line 54 in this doc.
Oh, got it. Thank you.
And to make it easier to click a link if you want to, you use the right pane rather than
trying to figure out how to copy and paste. Either way. So for co-writing, Gil, if you're
using Obsidian already, you kind of know that it's a good tool for managing a lot of markdown
files. A lot of, you know, it can replace a lot of Scrivener, for instance, as a writing tool.
The thing that we're mixing in here, the idea that we want to mix in is the idea of using Git
as well. And Git has a fair bit of overhead, a fair bit of friction to get started with,
but then it is super productive once you kind of get going. So if you can get into that,
you know, if you can get over the speed bump at the front, you start singing. And then
And for your other things, for a book,
getting the prices right would be a great thing
to do with Git and Markdown,
as long as all your other co-authors
or almost all of your other co-authors
are willing to get over that speed bump of let's use Git.
- How big is the speed bump, Peter?
- If you're using Obsidian already,
there's a very nice plugin called Obsidian Git
that hooks Obsidian up to Git.
Let me show you because again, we've got some time here.
- And if you can tell me again,
the first thing, the other plugin that you mentioned
that was the Scrivener Lite.
Did you put that in your timer?
- Yeah, line 54.
Obsidian itself is kind of a Scrivener lite.
And then the only thing it's kind of missing is output.
And then so the long form plugin adds the output thing.
Let me reshare my screen a little bit
and show you Obsidian Git.
[ Pause ]
>> Yeah, the question for me is going
to be how big is the speed bump?
Because --
>> Yeah.
>> And some of these folks may just have an assistant that,
you know, they give -- they deliver a text file
and somebody else --
>> Yeah.
>> -- can find it for them.
That may be --
Yeah, it's kind of--
well, yeah.
Can you make that bigger by any chance?
The text or the--
Never mind, I just closed the chat, so it's better.
Cool.
This is Obsidian.
This is a markdown page.
This particular-- I think this is peterkaminski.wiki.
Yeah.
So sorry to kind of jump ahead, folks.
But one of the things we use Obsidian for
is kind of information management.
Another thing is for collaborative writing.
Another thing is to make websites.
This one is actually kind of to make websites.
Can I stop you for a second?
Can you do collaborative writing in Obsidian?
Does it support a multi-user access to a page?
- It's a longer answer.
- Okay, skip it for now, we'll get it another time.
- Let me answer it real quick.
Especially Bill Anderson and I,
we've played with a lot of different ways to do this.
And it turns out that you kind of want to,
the short answer is yes,
and the long answer is it kind of depends
you want to do it and how like crazy making you mind it being. It turns out that Git is
actually still a pretty good way to do collaborative writing.
Or Obsidian Git.
Yeah. And it doesn't matter actually if the other person is using Obsidian. They could be using
Emacs or VS Code or whatever, but often it's Obsidian. My pattern is to do interactive sessions
and things where you're collaborating right in the teeth of it on HackMD. It's easy to move
files back and forth from HackMD to Obsidian. So my typical thing is to work cheek by jowl
in HackMD always. And then when we break up over the course of the week, we're working together,
then I would fall back to Git. For depending on who you're working with, Git might be a step too
far kind of. So then it turns out that if you just use Obsidian Sync, or you can use, which is a paid
service from the Obsidian, the fine folks at Obsidian. You can also use sync thing,
which is very similar, it turns out. There's almost real-time syncing. So, if somebody
was editing this page, if this was synced through Obsidian sync and someone else was
editing it, I would see their edits come through like a few seconds later. We don't have a
a way to negotiate through Obsidian Sync,
we don't have a way to negotiate conflicts.
So if I'm typing on one paragraph,
somebody else is typing one paragraph,
I think we're both gonna be sad at some point.
And you start ending up with,
Obsidian Sync I think is working with the whole file,
it's not working with the lines of characters.
HackMD works character by character,
and even if you are both typing in the same place,
you'll move apart from each other a little bit
and it's fine, it works really well.
So then the Git-based collaboration
is even a little chunkier than that,
than Obsidian Sync.
And it turns out that you also need a side channel.
You need to use Metamost or Slack or Discord
or WhatsApp or Signal or something like that to say,
"Hey, I'm gonna start working on this table of contents
"and elements of great fiction, is that okay?"
And the other person will also go, "Yeah, that's cool."
And maybe remember to link to these other pages
or something like that.
You wanna synchronize what you're working on
and you need a chat channel to do that.
So then once you're using Git,
this is the control panel for Git, Obsidian Git.
It turns out that like 90% of the time
you can just click this one button, actually two buttons.
You click this button to pull changes from the cloud
and you click this button.
Yeah, you got pull and push.
You kind of stay away from the push one.
This is like a super push that does everything for you.
So between that pull and the super push,
you can kind of just fire and forget
and not worry about it very much.
In the context of this inquiry, the Markdown plus Git inquiry, I'm hoping and I think Ray's
project will support it.
There's another level of using Git where you're actually using -- you use separate branches
for people working on separate things.
And you can do fine grained commenting and things like that on particular versions of
this.
So, through the Git and GitHub magic, you can have multiple, like many, many versions
potentially of this whole book and work together on it in a very fine grained way and accept
some of the changes, but some of the changes for further discussion, reject some of the
changes, all of that kind of stuff.
That's what software developers do with their code
all the time.
And that's the super turbocharged version.
And in this case, you're talking about Markdown plus Git?
Yes.
OK.
With the speed bump.
OK.
So the first speed bump is, I guess,
if you're just using Git for working together with people,
It's kind of a wash whether you use Git or Obsidian Sync or SyncThing.
If you're using Git, you can keep leveling up and get more sophisticated.
You can get very sophisticated, very powerful collaboration.
But it requires not only getting over that first speed bump, but then going up a bit
of a learning curve.
It's not as steep as it seems, I think, but it's also not very well documented and not
very, the path isn't well trodden. So that's part of the Git plus Markdown project is to try to,
you know, trod this path. That's, I think, not that big of a deal, but it feels like a big deal
still. Okay. Thank you. That's very helpful. So I think, I think for my purposes, I'd probably
start with the Markdown, with the, with the, with the Obsidian Git thing. Yeah. You might even...
or mark down Obsidian and then get started there
and see what we know about each other
and what the workflow looks like
and then talk to you about starting to work.
- That sounds good.
If you don't mind paying for Obsidian Git
and you have to, every person working together
needs Obsidian Git.
And then each person can host five documents.
Obsidian Git is a little bit easier place to start, I would say, because it's built
into Obsidian.
Obsidian Git is a third-party thing, and it carries a lot of baggage from Git into it
that can be a little bit overwhelming.
Good baggage or bad baggage?
Mostly bad.
Okay.
So, Pete, you kept saying Obsidian Git, but I think you meant Obsidian Sync, about paying
And only five documents?
Obsidian Sync is paid, and each person can share five documents.
Sorry if I mixed that up.
Five documents or five vaults?
Five vaults.
You're entirely right.
Yes.
And Obsidian Sync is easier and a little bit less effective.
Obsidian Git is a little bit more effective and a lot harder,
but it also is a gateway to superpower
and Obsidian Sync is not.
- Obsidian Git's got a lot of users.
- Yeah.
While we're talking about Git clumsiness,
I also wanted to point out down at line 85,
I've got a link to a page of GUI clients for Git and actually let's look at one or two
of those real quick.
Let me show you command line Git actually.
So first of all, it's command line.
I'll make the command line a little bit bigger here.
I guess I should have made it bigger
and then made the window bigger.
So you type things like get status.
You can actually edit, I'm gonna open this.
I could be using one of the beauties of Markdown and Obsidian and things like that is I can
be well, I also have this open in Obsidian, but I'm going to go through here and maybe
I'll even edit this page.
So I'm going to open that with Typora and make a change here.
Yeah, actually, I'm going to trash this.
So it's like, whoops, I made a mistake.
I won't publish this to the web.
So this is kind of an example of me editing some stuff,
maybe making a mistake.
If I say get status now, it's like,
hey dude, this has changed.
So then I can say, what are the changes?
Green is added, red is subtracted.
So, you know, here's the thing I did there.
This is where I screwed things up and kind of changed it.
So this is what a developer,
developers sometimes have a little fancier tool,
but this is kind of a deal with developers.
So then to deal with this,
I can say things like I can check out, check for branches.
I could get checkout dash B.
I can put my changes on a branch.
I can actually, anyway, you type things like this
and you get the idea.
Let's look at tower and I'll just type in
And I'll just show you the screen cap here.
Well, actually I'll show you two things.
We'll click on pricing first.
100 bucks per user per year.
It's like, oh my, you know, oh my gosh.
I think you might be able to get away with one user.
This is even fancier than you probably need,
but you can probably get away with 70 bucks a year.
So Tower is like the Primo version.
It also has Mac and Windows.
There's a nice Mac one that doesn't have a Windows version.
So you're not all using the same tool, which is a problem.
But anyway, here's the red and green thing.
Here's branches, instead of having to keep in your head
what branches are and how they work and stuff like that,
you get this beautiful picture of it.
And if you kind of like poke around at the features here,
it's got lots of fancy things for managing
all the Git magic.
And again, all that Git magic is superpower stuff.
It's like you all of a sudden you get 5X productivity or 10X productivity.
It's mind-blowingly cool.
But it's not cheap.
And either you pay money and use this GUI tool.
And even this, it's not super intuitive for me to figure out what all these lines mean.
It's kind of a difficult map to understand.
Bill and I use this command line thing
and keep that picture in our heads, actually.
Ray?
- Yes, so question about your comment
about 5X or 10X productivity.
Was that remark specific to writing code,
or would you say that that applies
for collaborative writing too?
- You know, the funny thing is,
I think it would actually be better
with collaborative writing.
- Wow.
- I think
with code, code is complex enough
that you kind of get bogged down in little details
and that's where the collaboration work goes.
I think with writing, you could,
you know, you could leverage the tools to
like multiply your group intelligence
in a way that doesn't happen too much in coding.
- Yeah, Pete, thanks for that.
My assumption now is that this stuff needs to be invisible
to the contributors, but could be very helpful
for the production team.
- Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
And especially for your use cases,
There's a nirvana where you've got a particular,
a nirvana for me maybe.
You've got a product or a project which is all writing,
there's no tech involved.
And each of your writers has enough
patience and tolerance for uncomfortableness
to go over the speed bump
and then climb up the learning curve.
And that may sound like a crazy thing for me to guess,
but it happened all the time
when computers were harder to use.
My wife, for instance, is not a techie.
She was using a command line.
She was using a command line email program.
So the thing that you do now with Twitter
or with Outlook or something like that,
she had to go through kind of the same level of clunkiness
and weird speed bumps and learning curves
just to be able to send email and things like that.
It's not, we have a conflation that only technical people
can learn how to do like these little fiddly computer things.
I don't, I've seen that not to be true.
Even this command line stuff, which I don't think,
nowadays I'd probably use the GUI for the non-tech folks.
But even as this, you know,
there's just a few things you learn.
You learn to type this, you learn to type that.
You have a little cheat sheet.
- I think I'm command line without lining indentations.
I think everybody could get pretty quickly.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
- So, all right.
- And it's pretty rote stuff.
You know, there's, you just go through your checklist
of steps and you just do it.
And it's, but it's not.
So structural defects of capitalism you've got
in the open with a large group of collaborators,
you don't have the opportunity to train
each of the collaborators up into like,
oh, I'm using Git and GitHub pull requests
and all that kind of stuff.
You don't have that opportunity with the mass public.
Those folks are not going to be the folks
that can tolerate that.
- Yeah, and the mass public might need something
like a G-Docs type of commenting feature,
but even that is too much for some humans.
- Yep, yep.
Having said that, there's another nirvana for everybody.
GitHub enabled a kind of collaboration
where you collaborate with people you don't know.
So once you, kind of like Kylie,
once you have that unlocked,
once you know how to do a little bit of Git stuff,
all of a sudden you can collaborate
with many people you don't know and vice versa.
Many people that you don't know can drop in on your project
without even talking to you and improve it.
And improve it in a way that's continually gated
by whatever, you don't give them right access
to the core thing.
They have right access to their copy of the core thing
and then they can say, hey, compare my core thing
with your core thing and grab whatever you think
an improvement. So that's another like you know another huge jump of superpower stuff that that
we should be able to get to in text someday. Thank you. Yeah sure thing Gil. Butler do you want to go?
Yeah sure. Just one last thing. I dropped in at line 38. I searched for Neo Books. There's a
a German site called neobooks.com that
appears to offer something.
Google Translate won't translate it,
so if one of you can figure out what it says,
that might be worth a look for somebody.
Cool, thank you.
OK, yeah, so for me, I'm a software developer,
so at least I fairly know how to use Git and GitHub
or wake up collaboratively with other developers.
So I got interested in this in order to learn more
about multiplayer writing.
And at the moment I'm learning technical writing.
So I thought it would be a nice project
to learn more about writing.
Yeah, then last month, yeah.
So last month I came across D.School,
the collaborative work in progress.
So they actually do almost the same thing.
So I thought, then I found like most of the work
that had already been done,
much of it is session on the project
and a lot has been written.
So it was just like us trying to make a few changes
when I got on course with the team,
the guys that are leading it.
So I thought maybe joining a project
that's starting from scratch
and then being able to build up from there
would be something interesting.
And then it would really help me
in terms of learning how to write
and then more so write in groups
'cause last year, I did an RKB, that's Kennel.
So Kennel Block 7, in case folks are not in Kennel.
So we were writing things about decentralized finance
And we did make amazing effort, but then I think we struggled
a bit in terms of getting the goals that we had put down
and then achieving them.
So I thought, yeah, maybe doing this would be interesting
and then help me learn more about collaborative writing.
Yeah, thanks.
Thanks, Butler.
That's great.
So I'm going to add kind of the last thing that you said.
I want to learn how project management works
with collaborative writing.
As it happens, I've got a lot of experience,
and some of the rest of us do, kind of in this group,
about project management and collaborative writing
and how to do those together.
So that would be really cool to work on.
Anybody else have got something for this?
And if you do, you can keep adding.
Let's talk, I'd kind of like to get pretty much done
at the top of the hour.
So we've got nine minutes left.
Let's talk about-- sorry, let me figure out
how to stop screen sharing here.
Let's talk about whether or not we're going to meet up again
and maybe think about how to get started
on either a small project or a big project.
I'm up for meeting again.
It doesn't have to be at this time every week.
We could either have like a get together session
and kind of figure out what we're going to do
and then maybe do some smaller groups,
one, two or three people working on a project.
We could meet every week, we could meet every other week.
- So I'd like to do that.
I'm most interested in actually experimenting
with a few folks about trying to, you know,
deal with this so-called speed bump,
little activation energy.
And I think I can help
'cause I've had a lot of experience with that.
- Yep.
- And I think that would be something valuable
because if we could learn how to help each other
use these tools to collaborate around writing,
we could then help other people do the same thing.
- I'm interested in that.
Oh, I'm sorry, Bill.
- And I just think that would be a valuable contribution
rather than just saying, oh, that's what developers do.
It's like, just throw that out, you know?
We're all human beings here and we got keyboards.
So turn me loose.
- Kyle?
- Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm interested in that too.
And that last item about collaborative writing
and project management, boy, have I been in the midst of that.
I mean, I have a lot of experience in project management
in my past, but I don't usually do that now.
I do more marketing strategy and writing.
So when I've been in those workflows,
it almost always ends up people write over one another
in Google Docs, and nobody has the timing right.
And then people pop in, like another example from Palo Alto,
there could be--
you never know who's going to pop in when you're
trying to think and write.
There might be a VP coming in because they
have access or product marketing managers or product managers.
And the PM and then other--
the creative department who's proofing it.
There's almost-- never smooth is what I can say.
It's like almost every one of my projects
got derailed many times for those reasons.
And a lot of the work I would do would, you know,
I'd have to get the old versions back.
And I'd always just do something
that's not very sustainable.
Save down the copy I was working on
just to make sure I had it.
'Cause it's easier to reference that
than to go back to different versions a lot of times.
So I think that's a huge problem
'cause my experience in these larger tech companies
is that they're working so fast and furiously
that they forget any protocols.
They don't, and everybody copies Google Docs
'cause they can't get in, so they'll make a new copy
and invite people to it.
And everything is now the web version, the browser version.
So you end up working in like 100 tabs
instead of having any desktop applications.
So those are things that slowed me down tremendously
and I think took down the productivity of teams
that I was working on it were like 75 people
where basically we'd work for months
and just waste all that.
You know, most of the work gets wasted.
So, but you're being driven to work really fast.
And they call it agile,
but of course it's not agile at all.
- Yeah.
Those are great use case horror stories.
(laughs)
- It's in the trenches.
- Yeah, yeah.
So it looks like we've got kind of quorum to keep meeting.
One quick question I have, we've got the community forum on
Passionate People.
I'm kind of moderately satisfied with it.
And there's a cool thing where I can add more course material,
pre-recorded video courses.
And then that's easy to get to from the Passionate People
community.
As a forum, it's kind of clunky for me.
And what's even more galling is it doesn't speak Markdown.
So what do people think?
Should we keep using the PathShifts People forum?
Should we make a mailing list?
Should we use-- there's a Mattermost server
I run that--
it's kind of like Slack, but that works really well.
We need a way to coordinate offline.
How do people feel about Passionate People, Community,
Mattermost, mailing list, something else?
- Well, I think that a mailing list is something
that everyone will be familiar with, so it has that plus,
but people sometimes get really a lot of emails
and it would be noisy to use it for discussions,
So Mattermost might work well for that.
And the forum, it might still be good for announcements.
I just don't know if it would be needed separately
if there were another channel like a Mattermost
or an email list.
- That's well said, Ray.
And along with email being kind of a,
it can get kind of like a swamp.
It's hard to find stuff in your email box.
The other thing is it's not kind of real time.
So a chat system like Mattermost is a lot more real time.
And if we use a chat system,
then we can practice collaborating.
Thanks, Gil.
we can practice collaborating, you know,
semi-synchronously, which works really well
with get and markdown.
I'm gonna suggest that we go to Mattermost.
Butler, Edwin, Kyle, does that sound okay?
- Sure.
- Yes. - Yeah.
Yeah, sure, that sounds okay.
- Awesome.
Bill, I know you're gonna drop.
- Yeah, I just wanna say one thing.
So I would like this, I'm in for the time being here,
you know, let's meet again and try and do something.
I also said I'm willing to help people
if they're one who don't know about Git
because I know some things
and I also faced my own breakdowns using it.
So I think I might be able to be helpful
in trying to help people get used to it.
- Bill is super knowledgeable
And he's kind of taking lead on trying to figure out
this speed bump thing, how to get it usable for folks.
He and I, both Bill and I have been working together
in the massive wiki world,
which is very similar to where we are now.
In the massive wiki world,
we're trying to figure out how to make it easier
for people to join up and use it.
So we've got some thinking
and some stuff written down already
on how to get through that.
I will set up a Mattermost channel,
and I will email that to the same people
I emailed things to last night.
So we'll probably pick up a few of the people
that did make this call.
And then let's figure out when to get together next.
This is an okay time for me, but it's not best.
So let's coordinate online, I guess,
and we'll figure it out in the chat.
Anything else?
I can stay for a while if folks want to stay
or we can kind of break up and just get onto Mattermost.
We'll see, Bill.
I can give a quick demo of Mattermost.
Is everybody on CSE Mattermost already per chance
or is this a new thing?
- For me, it's a new thing.
So I think it would be great for you to go through it.
So I just see how it works in it.
Yeah.
- Great.
The recording is gonna stop in a few minutes, I think,
which is fine.
It's not a problem at all,
but for the people on the recording,
if you missed the rest of this,
just get in touch and we'll get you going.
Okay, let me share my screen again.
And you can, to start off with, I'll email out the links to all this stuff again, so
don't feel like you have to.
There's a server called chat.collecticencecommons.org.
So a thing to know is there's -- you can see Mattermost on the web or you can see it in
the desktop app.
I'm not sure that you would see this right away.
So, if you're in the web, you just go to chat.collectivesensecommons.org, you sign up.
A thing to know is that if you get asked for a team, you use the team Agora, A-G-O-R-A.
So let me switch over to what it looks like once you're in.
It's pretty easy to get set up, you know, get an account, and it's free.
So the desktop app looks like this.
The desktop app and the web look exactly the same.
So let me switch to a decent channel here.
Where you start off first is a channel called Town Square.
Over here are all my channels.
If you're used to Slack, MatterVest is very much like Slack.
So there's just a few things that are a little bit different,
but pretty much the same.
So everybody gets put into a channel called Town Square.
And then when you start, you'll have very few channels
over here.
But you can go find a channel and search
for different channels here and then join them, basically.
I don't know.
Maybe that's enough for now.
I guess let me show you a few more things.
There's a thing called threads.
So if you see a little section like this,
this means that there's a threaded reply to this message.
And you click on that and you see over here,
you can actually change between threaded mode
and not threaded mode.
It's called collapse reply threads.
If I turn this setting off,
What happens is it shows me all the messages just kind of in a row.
And so you'll see that this is, you know, this is in reply to that,
but now you can't see that it's part of a thread.
You just see all the messages one after another.
So depending on how you like it, if you wanted to see all the messages
and not have to worry too much whether or not they're in a thread
or not find out that they're in a thread,
turn off collapsed reply threads.
If you want to see the threading,
then settings display collapse reply threads on.
So then the flip side of that is you have to look
for these little thread markers.
Let me see if there's a couple of interesting,
one of the channels that you might want to check out
is Coffee Shop.
We don't have a lot of threading.
Another one is Tools and Technology.
Any of the channels that have brackets and a word in front
of them belong to a certain group,
but you're welcome to join them.
So OGM, when I was talking about NeoBooks,
NeoBook is an OGM project.
And so in the name of the channel, there's that OGM.
And then it's about NeoBooks.
And this is a good example of, for a lot of calls, if--
sorry, a lot of channels are part of a project
where you want to have meetings.
Up at the top here, there's often a Zoom link
for the weekly meeting.
This is the time and the Zoom link.
This is a pretty common thing to do.
Any questions?
Sorry, that was kind of a rushed, quick tour.
- I think it's all right.
Yeah, as you said, I think it's much like Slack
and I know how to use Slack at least, so.
- Yeah, it's very similar to Slack, yeah.
- Yeah.
Anybody else?
No, I don't have a question right now.
Just to thank you for the session.
You're welcome.
Thanks for coming.