[Textop-en-phil] Next steps (important, please read)

[Larry Sanger]

All,

It appears all nominations that are going to be made have been made, for
philosophy texts.  So we will be using the following texts, at least to
begin with:

Hobbes, *Leviathan* (2 votes)
Locke, *Essay Concerning Human Understanding* (4 votes)
Russell, *Problems of Philosophy* (3 votes)

Here's what I propose we do next (I would like your feedback and
alternative ideas, if you have any, on the list or off):

(1) Look for experts on these texts, meaning people who have published a
significant amount of credible work on them, to serve as text editors.
The role of text editor, as I see it, is neither to direct work or do
most of the work, but instead serve as a decisionmaking resource: to
make decisions and settle disputes about how texts are chunked,
summarized, and placed within the outline.  So I *hope* we'll be able to
find at least three people to do this.  If you have any nominations or
ideas about people to approach, please let me know!

(2) I will also be getting in contact with various people via their
websites and mailing lists to get more people to work with these books.
It's possible that, as a result, we'll get enough people interested in
doing another one or two.  Personally, three is my minimum.

(2a) If step (2) generates significantly more people, we'll ask them to
nominate texts and, if there's interest, start up another one or two
texts.  Notice, if you (e.g., Clea) had your heart set on some text and
you were the only person voting for it, all you'd have to do is find
*one* other person who says he or she will work on it with you; then
we'll find an editor for that text.

(3) Next, I think we should create a wiki page for each text, and have
all who are working on a given text put their names on that page.  Then
the contributors volunteer to work on this section or that, and the
editor portions out work.

(4) Then work gets started!  The actual work procedure, I think, should
go like this:

	(a) Upload the texts to the wiki (probably several different
pages per text, for convenience).

	(b) Chunk and summarize the text (i.e., *part* of the text, you
can't do it all at once).  I will compose a general guide to how to
chunk and summarize a text, and post the guide on the wiki.  We'll work
on it and update it on the wiki as we proceed.  (I'll do this soon.)

	(c) Use a canonical mark, say "[XXXXX]", to mark the point in
each file where you left off work.  If work has not started yet on a
page, make that character string the FIRST item on the page.

	(d) While people should work on the part of the text they are
assigned, everyone should feel free to raise questions and even to edit
each other's work if necessary.  In other words, while there aren't yet
enough people here really to work in a strongly collaborative way, we
can at least act as each other's reviewers.

	(e) We need to decide on a forum and method for settling hard
questions.  While editors can settle questions with respect to each of
their texts, often the questions will be *general* questions, not just
about individual texts, and there needs to be a forum whereby these
things are actually hashed out.  From my personal experience I can tell
you that, if we work thoughtfully and conscientiously, we will have
zillions of questions and discussing them could be very interesting.  I
would say that most of the *general* discussion (about rules, about
general choices of outline headings, and so forth) should happen on
textop-en-phil (this mailing list), while discussion of particular
matters could happen either on the "Discussion" page attached to a
text's homepage, or just via e-mail among a text's collaborators.  The
results of discussion should be summed up on the wiki whenever
generalizable.

(5) We will co-write a report based on our experience, making
recommendations and so forth, when we are done.  I hope we will be
finished in no longer than, say, four months.

=====

You might be a hard-headed "I'll believe it when I see it" cynic, but
I'll say this anyway--just think: we could be starting something really
historic here.  If we manage to do even a modest "proof of concept," as
I think is probable (not certain, of course), we'll generate
considerable excitement about Textop as a project.  We'll be able to do
a press release and more general recruitment.  We'll get more people
involved as a result, probably get some programming talent interested in
building/adapting open source software for us to use.  So I'm pretty
excited.  I'll be working pretty hard myself on the wiki, and I hope you
will too--it really is a worthwhile project.  These first few steps will
be challenging, but very interesting too, and worth the effort.

The above is posted and editable at 
http://www.textop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Collation_Project_pilot_launc
h_plan

--Larry

----------------
Dr. Larry Sanger
Director of Collaborative Projects, Digital Universe Foundation 
100 Enterprise Way, Suite G370, Scotts Valley, CA  95066 
larry.sanger at dufoundation.com http://www.digitaluniverse.net/