This article documents an experiment in collaborative group writing of an academic article. Rather than deciding beforehand who the list of authors will be and then working together to write the article - e.g, by exchanging by email subsequent versions of Word documents with track changes enabled - this experiment opened the writing process to anyone interested in the topic, and used the collaborative writing environment of GitHub to facilitate the process.
This current article is an evaluation of that process, again open to anyone interested in the topic.
The process of writing the original article was structured as a test a number of research questions which are evaluated in this article, namely:
- can an undefined group of writers come together using the GitHub platform to collaboratively author an academic article that is successfully submitted to and accepted by a journal of the group's choosing?
- can discussions amongst the group members be accommodated within the GitHub framework (i.e., the repo's wiki, issues and pull requests)?
- can the article can be written in under 2 months from the date that it is publicly deployed to the date it is submitted to a journal?
- can GitHub's network metrics (e.g., pulse, graphs, network), and the evaluation of the group members, be used to determine authorship?
- does being listed as an author provide sufficient incentive for potential authors to contribute?
- can group decisions, including changing any of the "rules of the game", be made by the members of the group using principles of consensus decision-making?
###Contributing
You can raise issues, issue a pull request or contribute to the wiki. We are not concerned with who you are or how significant you think your contribution is. Start by pionting out a typo. Then dive in to more significant changes.
First Time on GitHub? Don't Know Where to Start? First thing is to Sign Up for GitHub.
After you have a GitHub account you can go straight to the article and start writing. Don't worry - you won't break anything (probably). When you're done, you'll see a little square in the top right hand corner - click on it and you should probably be able to figure your way along from there.
But if you want to learn a bit about GitHub first, try our beginner tutorial.
A key guideline for contributing: GitHub is not an ideal platform for text collaboration. One big limitation is that multiple changes to one file submitted in a pull request cannot be selectively "accepted" as with, for example, a Word document. To accommodate this, changes submitted as pull requests should be limited to one line or, at most, one paragraph. For more substantial changes (e.g., discussions about major structural changes), you can raise an issue or talk about it on the wiki.
###Rules for Participating
- participation is open to any interested person with the technical means to connect to and edit the repository.
- contributions must be made through GitHub. Contributors must have their own GitHub account. If you want to be credited for authorship, you will want to use your real name (or be prepared to reveal your real name should the article be accepted for publication).
- anyone who makes a contribution (regardless of magnitude or perceived importance) automatically becomes a member of the group (these are listed as contributors in GitHub). A member may choose to resign their membership at any time. Membership can be revoked using the consensus decision making process of the group.
- a limited subset of contributors will have enhanced administrator rights beyond those of contributors (these are called collaborators in GitHub). This is to ensure that a number of group members can perform functions such as merging pull requests on behalf of the group (collaborators cannot act without the consent of the group). Collaborators initially will be members of the Arizona State University Center for Policy Informatics, but subsequent collaborators will be added based on the wishes of the group.
- members of the group "own" an equal share of the repository regardless of when they join or the magnitude or significance of their contribution. Note, however, that the entire repository is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, so ownership conveys very little benefit to any individual member.
- the group has the ability to decide what constitutes authorship (e.g., contributions above a certain threshold). This decision will be made by consensus.
- order of authorship (or some other means of identifying relative contributions) will be determined by the group members (using a process to be determined).
- group decisions, including changing any of the "rules of the game", will be made by the members of the group using principles of consensus decision-making.
###Licensing Except as otherwise noted, this github-experiment repo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This does not mean unlicensed. Please ensure you understand what this license entails before forking or otherwise attempting to work with the contents of this repo in another space.