Hi Magnus, Stephen, All,
I was waiting for Reinhard to have a look at this. He
was the person who expressed a preference for using word rather than learning
new technologies. I spoke with him on Wednesday and suggested he talk with
Stephen but he was in the middle of the LRC conference which he organises so I
am not sure that he got around to this. I think if we are all agreed that this
would be a good system we can just go ahead with it, but I would like to hear
Reinhard's comments.
Thanks,
Peter.
From: Magnus Martikainen
[mailto:]
Sent: 24 September 2004
18:09
To: ;
Subject: RE: [trans-ws] Collaborative
editing of the spec
Hi
all,
I would suggest that we
give this a try. Any other opinions? If not:
When can we start?
Do we need a ballot to determine
whether we go ahead with this?
Do we need to put together some
official guidelines? Or should we perhaps simply run with it for now and see
how it works?
Do we need any type of protection
for this site, to avoid external access?
Cheers,
Magnus
From:
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 11:20
PM
To:
Subject: RE: [trans-ws] Collaborative
editing of the spec
Magnus,
1. The wiki supports this
automatically. When you edit and update a page, the page has a link 'Back
in time' at the bottom. You can use this to track changes, and rollback if
necessary. At present, this mechanism is pretty rudimentary, but I believe
that the developers are working on something more sophisticated.
2. The notifications are
handled through RSS. Check out www.bloglines.com for a web based RSS
aggregator, or FeedDemon (http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp) for a
windows based one, if you're not familiar with RSS. Effectively, what will
happen is if you subscribe to the feed, your feed aggregator will poll it on a
regular basis (say every 2 hours), and you'll see any changes
there.
3 & 4. The idea
behind wikis is that everybody can add whatever they like, and that through the
editing process it all gets cleaned up properly. What I would suggest is
that people put their own contributions & annotations directly onto the
appropriate page, and we can remove all of this in the final publication.
The typical approach that you see in wikis is that people surround their
own contribution with horizontal lines (e.g. see the note on this page:
http://212.147.140.51:2500/wiki/show/requestQuote to see what I
mean).
Obviously, people will have to
be sensible about how they edit this, and not just change anything they want
just because it suits them.
Anyway, good to
hear that there is some appetite for this.
Regards,
Steve
---------------------------------------------
Stephen
Flinter
Connect Global Solutions
[t] +353 (0)1 882 9038
[f] +353 (0)1
882 9050
[m] +353 87 798 1228
[e]
[w]
www.connectcgs.com
--------------------------------------------
"Magnus
Martikainen" <>
21/09/2004
18:07
To
<>,
<>
cc
Subject
RE: [trans-ws]
Collaborative editing of the
spec
Hi
Stephen,
This is a great
initiative! I am all for it, it should help us a lot to keep the specs
up-to-date if everyone that identifies an issue can go in and change it
directly.
But obviously with that
freedom comes some responsibility, and I guess we may need to put together some
guidelines for how we should work.
I am not familiar with
Wiki or RSS so I have a couple of questions:
* Is it possible to
track the history of the content, retrieve an “old” version, or see exactly what
changes has been done and perhaps reverting to an earlier version?
* Is it possible to get
notifications when content is changed and to see what changes were
made?
* It could be useful to
be able to do edit the content as a “change proposal” without it explicitly
being part of the “official” content until it has been signed off by others.
Would this be possible?
* Is it
possible to annotate changes with comments explaining why they were
made?
Thanks a lot for taking
your time in setting this up!
Magnus
From:
[mailto:]
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2004 3:51
AM
To:
Subject: [trans-ws] Collaborative
editing of the spec
All,
given that a number of
people are tasked with editing the spec, I thought that a collaborative
environment such as a wiki might be useful. To that end, I spent a few
hours creating a wiki, and making it publically available.
Check out:
http://212.147.140.51:2500
For those of you who use
RSS feed aggregators, there is also as RSS feed available, so you can follow
progress on the doc:
http://212.147.140.51:2500/wiki/rss_with_content
The wiki engine (Instiki -
www.instiki.org) is supposed to have PDF & LaTeX export functionalaity, but
that appears to be broken at the moment. However, when I get that sorted,
it should mean that we can produce a printable copy of the spec directly from
the wiki.
Take a look, and let me
know what you think, and whether you reckon it's worth pursuing with this
approach, or whether the posted/emailed Word docs are better.
Peter, if you're happy with
this approach, feel free to post a link on the TransWS home page. I'll
keep the wiki server up for the duration of the development of the spec (and
perhaps move it to a more permanent home if this exercise is
successful).
Regards,
Steve
---------------------------------------------
Stephen
Flinter
Connect Global Solutions
[t] +353 (0)1 882 9038
[f] +353 (0)1
882 9050
[m] +353 87 798 1228
[e]
[w]
www.connectcgs.com
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