[Tf-curation] Best Practices Guide: switch to GitBook and upcoming meeting (Doodle!)

[Twan Goosen]

[Summary: we are moving the work on the best practices to GitBook. There
will be a virtual meeting on CMDI Best Practices in January - please
fill in the Doodle at <https://doodle.com/poll/2hfxk8krq5vnxuzc>].

Dear CMDI and Curation task force members,

After presenting the work on the CMDI Best Practices Guide in Budapest
(and fortunately receiving quite a bit of positive feedback there :D),
the regular work on the guide has stalled a bit. We have been some minor
editorial work and in addition to that we have migrated the document
into the GitBook platform. Although using a combination of Google Docs,
Word and uploads of manual PDF exports has worked quite well thus far,
we think that in the long run GitBook offers a more sustainable and open
work flow. It will allow us to work on 'branches' of the guide in
parallel and merge these back together at any stage. Also, anyone can
easily join in and comment or make suggestions on the published guide or
any intermediate version by means of the 'discussions' feature. All of
this does take some getting used to, but we hope you are all willing to
give it a try and get used to it fairly quickly.

We wrote a little introduction/set of guidelines, which can be found on
the CLARIN Trac at
<https://trac.clarin.eu/wiki/Taskforces/CMDI/BestPracticesEditing>.
Please have a look if you wish to start or continue contributing.

The GitBook project for the guide we will be working on can be found at
<https://www.gitbook.com/book/cmdi-taskforce/cmdi-best-practices>. This
is actually a fork of another project to which we can push changes
whenever we want to do a 'release' - i.e. publish a new version. We
think it would be good to have a regular 'maintenance cycle' of, for
example, 2 or 3 months, during which we all can work on one ore more
sections, after which we have a meeting to discuss the changes and
decide which changes should be merged into the 'published' version. The
current published version (content wise identical to the current draft)
is already available at
<https://clarin-eric.gitbooks.io/cmdi-best-practices>.

To make it easy to get started we already prepared a couple of 'change
request' - one per remaining section of the document. The list can be
found at
<https://www.gitbook.com/book/cmdi-taskforce/cmdi-best-practices/changes>.
If you are the editor of one of these sections, you can simply open the
change request and press 'Start editing'. If you wish to make a
suggestion to another part of the document, or another change with a
different scope, just make a new change request. Please do not 'accept'
(merge) any change requests into the primary version yet - our proposal
is to do this after having had a meeting to discuss the changes, which
is easier with the changes still unmerged.

Menzo will propagate (in a parallel branch) the changes which were made
in CE-2017-1076 but have not made it yet to the Google Doc/GitBook.
Followed by some suggestions based on lessons learned by implementing
some of the Best Practices in Schematron.

If you would like to work on the guide using GitBook, please let one of
us know and we will invite you into the organisation and give you
contributor rights.

Finally, here's a doodle for picking a date for a meeting to evaluate
the use of GitBook and hopefully also proposed changes and additions to
the guide:

<https://doodle.com/poll/2hfxk8krq5vnxuzc>

Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Best,
Menzo and Twan