A Google doc to work collaboratively. Feel free to contribute.
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Hi Fabio,
Did you copy and paste this manually or is there a way to auto-generate this from the forum posts? I like the formatting and having a single overview document of all of the sessions, but I worry about dividing documentation efforts into multiple places and keeping them in sync. Having everything in the forum provides some nice interactive features (e.g., liking posts, initiating conversations, etc.) and everything produced by the GOSH community is fully searchable.
We could write a script that would pull forum topics (e.g., anything in the “Great Lakes GOSH category”) and autogenerate a document like this using pandoc. I think this could be useful…
One of the reasons we’ve avoided gdocs in particular is that they are not open source and are inaccessible in some places (e.g., China).
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Hello
I copied manually. I agree having contents on different places and using closed-source is a bad solution. Pandoc seems quite practical for a common outcome, but does not lever the aspect of co-writing?
If I am discussing policies in the group, I may want to document some elements about funding. Using a co-working document enables me to share that in real time with people working on funding in another room… I see all groups contributing to one deliverable that is also directly usable outside of the community, plus, there is no need to run after people to have them share the notes they take on LibreOffice or others…
As FLOSS, I only know Sandstrom and Framapad (some FLOSS software for research), which need improvement in regard to formatting, rendering and accessibility. Do you know others?
Best,
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Having missed the event, I’m looking forward to reading the report outs and documentation!
With regard to the conversation about documentation platforms, in previous events we have documented on the forum during the event as wiki posts so anyone can edit them and they’ve been copied manually into Google Docs by the documentation team for the collaborative writing of the report and for anyone to add bits that we missed, comment etc (exactly what is happening now 
). There are issues with access in China but the forum posts are still open for comment/edits and those are picked up by the documenters, then final copies have been published in other formats.
If groups wanted to spin up etherpads/gdocs or any other form of note-taking during the meeting that was great as long as the content got copied to the forum.
For collaborative documentation I long ago accepted that no matter how much I’d like there to be viable FLOSS alternative for google docs, there just isn’t and it’s more valuable to document and share the knowledge in a way that everyone can contribute than to spend time/energy/money in hosting other solutions. The net result is more shared open knowledge about open hardware and that is the greater good, even if it’s not on a FLOSS platform initially. Which is not to say it can’t then be hosted on one. For the GOSH Roadmap, collaborative editing was done in GDocs and now the full text is hosted on Gitlab courtesy of Luis Felipe who did a great job copying everything over.
We’ve used the GOSH website as a portal to documents about each of the events with a page per event and you can also pin posts and add links to the header of the Forum categories so I think the “having everything in one place problem” can be solved with some good cross-linking.
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Thank you for your contributions! 