Tectonic shift think tank/Tech requirements/Versioning

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Problem phases

  1. Defining a section and breaking it off
    • Required actions:
      • Built-in 'spidering' to include required images and templates
      • Come up with some kind of multi-page module selection metadata to easily select pages/chapters/books
  2. Attaching that to a second wiki
    • Required actions:
      • Import should store metadata allowing one-click update (resynch)
        • record branch points
      • conceptual: draft vs final publishing spaces
      • conceptual: trusting working with remote people?
  3. Reattaching it to the original as a branch
    • Required actions:
      • Short-term: push back on trunk, leaving local history local
        • "What happens in the gated community stays in the gated community"
      • Short-term: import with name suffix, etc to sit alongside
      • Long-term: explicit branching support in the history information
  4. Merging of branches

Forces

  • Downstream/offline copying, similar to "cvs checkout"
    • Customization, localization of resources
  • Upstream publishing
    • Private development before publication "Gated community"
      • eg East Asia strong cultural preference to develop privately

http://www.oeforum.org/collabtools.html#ToolFeatureSet

Structured export

  1. Take a page and its resources - by spidering
    • Templates
    • Images/media
  2. Multipage structured modules
    • chunks: sections - chapters - books
    • enough structure to identify useful semantic page groups
    • How to arrange this?
      • machine-readable metadata?
      • human-directed (drag-n-drop UI)
  3. Select/spider additional linked resources
    • optionally!

Offline issues

Gated community development

  • grab some stuff from a central site
  • add new information to it...
    • new body of work local to those profs
    • use that localized work in teaching
      • like a customized book
  • and can publish that to let others use it
    • it's public
    • it's got your name on it!
      • incentive - openness, fame, all that that academics love :)
  • How does publishing work?
    • checkout/push checkin -> to public site

Formats

  • Wiki export/import
    • online, intranet, offline interactive development
  • Additional output formats for offline use
    • HTML flat or .zip archive
      • online or intranet
    • Word/RTF/ODT/etc
      • printing or easy offline customization
    • Latex/PDF/etc
      • printing only

Offline editor tools

  • Self-contained wiki app?
    • 'wiki-on-a-stick' style?
    • + ability to sync down/up

Merging

  • Offline editing that's meant to go back to a central place needs to deal with merging a lot better than what we have now
  • ...
    • is there a good FOSS HTML-level and/or prose-level diff/merge tool?