Over the next few months we are going to try an experiment in online authoring. Those who follow our blog will know that we released a mobile web developers guide in electronic format in March (Mobile Web Developer’s Guide Part I). At that time we promised that we would follow up with Part II of this guide.
This time we are going to do things a little differently... For Part II, rather than publishing this as a fait accompli when it is ready, we are going to try to author this book collaboratively on mobiForge. As we see it, this has a number of benefits:
- The resulting work should be broader and deeper — by allowing experts around the world to contribute to this guide we have a better chance of coming up with something really good. This is especially important for complex topics such as content adaption, device detection etc.
- Errors should be corrected more quickly
- The document can continue to evolve and improve as long as we host it
- An online document is easier to search and reference (as long as you are online..)
Once we've reached a point at which the guide can stand on its own, we plan to occasionally release PDF snapshots of it for those who prefer a packaged version.
Note that this will not be a wiki — we feel that for this particular case a little more structure will benefit the final result. (For those who are interested, we are planning to use the Drupal Book Module to manage this). The model we intend to use is that registered users who request access will be allowed to edit the text. We'll probably have to put a few ground rules in place to keep things sane e.g. no product advertising etc.
As a first step in this process, we will be taking Part I of this guide and making it into a hosted web document. Then we'll publish the proposed outline for Part II and seek comments, before actually creating the section headers and fleshing out the content.
Please let me know if you are interested in contributing to this.
