#A Github Experiment: Reporting on an experiment in collaborative group writing version 0.1.3

##10 Second Briefing:

• if you can read this page, you're invited to co-write this article with us.
• if you're really stuck, ask a question on the wiki - question page.
• the experiment runs from April 1 - July 31, 2014
• DAYS REMAINING IN EXPERIMENT: 0 (deadline = July 31 2014)

##Update - Working with Prose.io If you want an easier way to make changes, try this:

1. Make sure you are logged into GitHub.
2. In another tab or window go to https://prose.io/ and click on "Authorize on GitHub".
3. If all goes according to plan, you should then be able to go to https://prose.io/#ASU-CPI/github-experiment and see a clearer path to edit any of the files you want.
4. Just click on a file, start adding, deleting, changing ...
5. When done, click the save icon on the right hand side, then click on the "Commit" button.

###Places to Get Started

• This folder contains the article itself and its various components.
• These are some notes on how to contribute.
• These are the "rules" for participating.
• Research Questions
• And these are some research questions we hope to address.

###An Honest GitHub Experiment

The CPI is launching an experiment in open collaboration and we invite you to join us.

The Center’s open governance research stream has been exploring how the GitHub platform can be adapted from its primary purpose as a collaborative software development environment, to be used instead for collaborative text-based writing.

In seeking to use GitHub for open collaborative writing, we are testing in-part the hypothesis proposed by the noted social media researcher Clay Shirky that the next great frontier in open collaboration lies in platforms such as GitHub that were originally designed to facilitate software development, but may signal a fundamental transformation from coordination to collaboration.

The central research question for this experiment is: can GitHub be used effectively as a platform for open collaboration in co-authored academic writing?

The products from this experiment will be two articles to be submitted to academic journals:

• Honest PI: a fully-developed version of our earlier blog post “What’s an honest policy informatician to do?” that looked at the challenge of opening governance when we have trouble agreeing on “the facts”, and when beliefs and perspectives influence how people interpret facts in public policy discussions; and,
• GitHub Experiment: a research paper that will observe and report on the process of writing the first article.

Both articles will be written entirely within the GitHub platform. We are inviting anyone to join us as a co-author on either or both of these articles.

We are approaching this experiment in an exploratory fashion. While we are aware of many examples of the use of GitHub for collaborative writing, we are not aware of many successful truly open collaborative writing efforts on GitHub that have succeeded.

We fully anticipate that persuading colleagues to participate in this experiment will not be easy; but we believe that there is enormous potential in this approach. Above all, however, this is truly an experiment - we don't know what will happen. Will the group fragment and fail to meet its objective? Will conflicts be unresolvable? Will authorship become too contentious to determine? Can traditional academic incentives attached to authorship be accommodated within GitHub? Will anyone contribute? Will too many show up?

The upside of uncertainty is that it’s usually exciting. Welcome to a very uncertain experiment.