[FM Discuss] Draft of Data Journalism Handbook written in 48 hours

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

Its Jonathan Gray from the Open Knowledge Foundation. I co-ran the
#ddjbook session at MozFest with Liliana Bounegru from the European
Journalism Centre (in cc). We're glad to see all the enthusiasm for
the book - and will let you know when it is released! :-D

Just to clarify a few things:

  * We did indeed know about Booki, and we used and evaluated it quite
a bit a while back for other manuals and books we've published - e.g.
for opendatamanual.org and datapatterns.org. Additionally I've met
with Adam Hyde several times in Berlin to discuss possible
collaborations with Booki and whether the OKF might be able to support
the project with hosting, infrastructure, etc. Suffice to say: we're
fans of the project. ;-)

  * We're still thinking of using Booki. But first we're busy
collating and editing material from various documents - and taking
futher contributions, which are still pouring in! People are still
editing some of the documents we've created so we don't want to switch
quite yet, but may use booki for the first full 0.1 release and
subsequent editions.

  * We thought about using Booki to do initial editing but ended up
using Google Docs due to the way we were drafting the book. We wanted
contributors to be able to easily add material, initially without
logging in or being added to a section, and to be able to edit the
same piece of text simultaneously. This was important as we had a
mixture of technical and non-technical people, people were very busy,
and some people were there in person, editing pieces of text that were
simultaneously being edited by people contributing virtually. There
were up to 60 people editing different parts of the book
simultaneously. Google Docs is definitely not ideal, but it ticked a
few key boxes under the circumstances. It is not a long term option,
but a short term hack to support a complex, ambitious, real time
editing project. We'll be migrating the material from this initial
sprint somewhere else in the coming weeks.

  * We had some fruitful discussions with Adam T at MozFest, who was a
great evangelist for booki. We discussed switching there and then, but
concluded that switching while people were mid editing was not such a
great idea. Switching was postponed until after the Festival, so we
had time to properly play around with booki again and see if it is the
right tool to use. Prima facie, Liliana and I really like it and it
seems like an ideal tool - but we also need to check with other people
at EJC and OKF.

  * In general we are going to give booki another test. We've had a
look at it on several occasions and there were a few key things that I
think it couldn't do that we wanted it to do. I've noticed a few minor
editing and formatting things, but I think there were also other
things to do with translation, versioning, source code, etc, which led
us to host books like the Open Data Manual on Sphinx. I love the
project, the fact it is open source, and (as the OKF is Python
powered) the fact it is written in Python. More on our evaluation of
technology options here:
<http://wiki.okfn.org/Open_Data_Manual/Technology_Options>. We'll give
it another shot and let you know what we decide (+ feedback) as soon
as we can.

You'll be hearing more from us soon! ;-)

J.

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg