Markdown and Git for Collaborative Writing, 2023-08-24

Call Details

• Thursday, August 24, 2023, 7am PDT (14:00 UTC) for 60 minutes
• jitsi: https://meet.jit.si/markdown-and-git-for-collaborative-writing
• recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAAtlDTi3Qk

Notes

What do we want to get out of this? Who is "we"?

• Expand from single-player writing to multi-player writing
  • To express ideas better for a wider audience
  • To add / mix in more ideas from more people
• Work on a specific project
  • White paper
  • Presentation, at least the skeleton / outline for a presentation, even if not the final production copy
  • perhaps, an academic paper
• Learn Git to be able to join into software dev projects
• Understand better how dev / tech people work
  • Cross silos
• Understand the social / market dynamics of GitHub better
• Will help with learning to code, how to prompt AI, how to learn how to code with ChatGPT
• Tech-savvy but not a coder, may need Git+Markdown for projects
• cowriting — can this be better than Google Docs?
• "Getting The Prices Right" — curated, ~15-essay book, multi-author anthology, with cross comments
• "Structural Defects of Capital-ism" — "book" I'm writing…and wonder about doing it "in the open" with a small or large group of collaborators
• I'm already a software dev, but I'm getting into technical writing, and want to do it multi-player
• Interested in joining a project that's just getting going
• I have experience in tech writing about Defi
• I want to learn how project management works with collaborative writing

What if it's not a "Book"?

• NeoBooks
  • NeoBooks in Jerry's Brain
  • separately, there is neobooks, a company for self-publishing books
• Wikibooks

Goals

• Decide who will keep meeting, how, and why.
• Decide on first collaborative project.
• Note any unanswered questions to answer on this page.
• (stretch) Interactive Demo/Practice Session, see section below

Topics

• Async collaboration / notification channel
• Coming up with a project to work on together for the next week
• Interactive demo/practice session
• Writing Long Form Content With Obsidian
• Pete: can co-write tightly in HackMD, then move to Obsidian

Async collaboration / notification channel

Is the Path Shift People community a good async collaboration / notification channel? Do we want to try something else in addition or in replacement?

• Path Shift People community (what we have currently)
• Mailing list
• CSC Mattermost (similar to Slack)
• other?

Working answer: To keep things interactive, going to use Collective Sense Commons mattermost. https://chat.collectivesensecommons.org/

Coming up with a project to work on together

Ideas

• Podia: Proposed first learning activity
• A fiction story with some pre-defined characters and their backgrounds
• Wikibook in Lionsberg wiki
• A Markdown + Git how-to / reference guide
• others?

Interactive Demo/Practice Session

Possible activities

• Markdown editing
• Develop a presentation using Markdown slides collaboratively
• Git sharing / versioning
• GitHub-style collaboration
• Discuss command-line Git vs. GUI clients
  • Git GUI Clients - Developer Wiki (Massive Wiki)

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