[Fhsst-authors] Discussion with Yochai

[Mark Horner]

Hi everyone

I just wanted to keep everyone informed about my discussion with Yochai 
- see email earlier this week.

Yochai phoned me on Thursday and we had a relatively long discussion 
about the FHSST project. His main interest was why we are still going. 
Its not that simple to pin this down, though have a group of people who 
just won't quit helps ;)

One thing we discussed at length was the size of an assignment. He 
studies open source projects and its clear that projects that dish out 
massive assignments fail quickly. If an individual contributor can make 
a contribution in a few minutes to 10s of minutes it seems that you'll 
be more successful. The best example here is wikipedia. Every 
contribution is basically a few paragraphs so its very easy for people 
to make a contribution.

The problem, we agreed, is that an encyclopaedia doesn't need the same 
consistent style throughout. It doesn't require flow, consistent 
language usage etc. If you look at the wikibooks site you will notice 
that the very nearly complete books were all written by a single 
individual with one exception - the cookbook. But the cookbook doesn't 
require the same cohesion a textbook does - its closer to the 
encyclopaedia than a textbook.

We agreed that if we could make smaller assignments we could probably 
move things along much faster in FHSST but its not clear to me how to do 
that easily. I am definitely open to suggestions. We both thought that a 
wiki was a first step - then users don't need to learn as much new 
software. We'll see how things progress with the Biology book to try to 
make an estimate of this.

I think that starting the first few members off with CVS and LaTeX was a 
mistake and we probably lost a large number of contributions due to 
technical software issues. Unfortunately the first 3 books are too far 
along to change that now.

He was just interested in my feelings about what works for us and what 
doesn't.

He did wish us the best of luck and say that he thinks our project is a 
really worthy cause.

Keep up the good work everyone!

Cheers,

Mark


        
        
                
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