At OSS Watch we maintain a series of briefing notes relating to open source software. These documents undergo peer review and are subjected to a rigourous quality control process. In most cases they are developed behind closed doors and only released for public consumption when they meet our strict quality measures. However, I am increasingly working in the open on these documents in our wiki. This allows me to quickly collate information on a topic in response to client requests. This has been, for some time, a point of contention in the team - in many ways the wiki bypasses our quality control (although we clearly differentiate between the two sources of information).
Another of the OSS Watch team, Gabriel Hanganu, and I have recently been working on documents dealing with the governance models of open source projects. Due to an immediate need for this content we started the work in the wiki and therefore utilised another benefit of open development and early release - the opportunity to recieve early feedback, both from each other and from third parties.
Using the wiki and working collaboratively in this case was ideal since we were very familiar with one form of governance model and were therefore able to write some of the content quickly and easily. However, we were less sure of the content for the alternative styles of governance model.
Our approach, which worked wonderfully, was for one of us to focus on documenting what we knew and the other to use the initial outline to inform his research work into other models. We found that we’ve both been spurred on by the others contributions and the document has moved forward even when one of us has been swamped by other things.
The fact that the documents have had loads of “FIXME” notices slapped all over them for some time has clearly indicated where further research work has been needed and, over time, one or the other of us has been dropping links to relevant resources in there and expanding on the content as appropriate.
We feel that this is a really good example of collaborative authoring. By the end of this month we are likely to have three published documents from the two of us. I’m pretty sure that if we’d been working in isolation we would still be struggling with them.
Furthermore, since these documents have been written in the open, we have received a number of comments on how to improve them from third parties. The end result is that the final published documents that will go through the OSS Watch quality assurance process will be of a higher standard than if we’d kept them in house and private.
Some people feel that since OSS Watch are the “authority” on open source issues we ought to hide this kind of investigative work. Personally, I think the use of our wiki to do our investigation in public is an improtant new step. It shows that we thoroughly research our matierials and seek third party input. The downside is that whilst our published materials on the OSS Watch site go through rigourous quality control processes and are trusted sources of information, our wiki does not undergo the same level of quality control - there are occassions when the informaiton there is incomplete.
Do you think that exposing “in development” materials in this way is a problem?
If you are interested the documents in question are Governance Models, Benevolent Dictator Governance Model, and Meritocratic Governance Model.
Hello Ross,
> Some people feel that since OSS Watch are the “authority” on open source issues we ought to hide this kind of investigative work.
Absolutely NOT. I’d say if you are to be respected as an authority in (not just *on*) open source issues you simply must do as much as possible in the Open. This is something that impresses me about Mozilla. You want to be a respected voice in the community as well as advising those just dipping a toe in the water as consumers.
> Do you think that exposing “in development” materials in this way is a problem?
No as long as collaborative resources a clearly identified as such so people can make a quality judgment. I guess wikipedia is a reference for how to deal with problems of quality/vandelism. My personal view is that while letting go is hard to do (perhaps as it goes against ingrained ideas taught since school days, perhaps as something in ‘print’ seems authoritative) it opens you up to the many eyes (brains) QA effect. I find it telling (exciting) that you find the quality has increased by being open.
To go further you could make the wiki the ‘live’ articles and use a QA process that monitors the recent changes. At least that is what I have done with articles on schoolforge, not that much has happened to them yet to my disappointment.
I meant to add that a status indicator or other flow process should help alleviate concerns about incomplete works being treated as authoritative or at least finished. I guess something like the w3c do with candidate recommendations, but even more open.