Instructions for the Collaborative System for Non-Members
Created | Updated May 17, 2004
| Main Page || | Consequential Collaboration || | Evolutionary Collaboration || | Team Collaboration || | Peer Review Emulation || |
These are the instructions for the researchers wishing to take part in the collaboration project, but who have not signed up for access to the Collaborator account itself. For clarity, such researchers will be known as the 'clients'; and the team of researchers who have access to the group account will be known as the Collaboration team.
This project is all about finding out which is the fastest and most efficient method of producing good quality collaborative guide entries. So the first thing to do is choose something to write about, and then choose the method you would like to pursue to get it written. Note that the entries written using this project do not strictly need to be for the Edited Guide; you could use them for the UnderGuide too.
In all of these methods, you use threads to post the guide entry. Members of the Collaboration team then copy what you have written into guide entries on the Collaborator Account page. To get started, choose a method from the guidance below, click the appropriate link above, and start a conversation for your entry.
Consequential Collaboration
This form of guide-entry writing is suitable for people that know of a topic for an entry that they think should be covered, but don't know an awful lot about it, or only know the basics of it. To start, you only write the first section of the entry that you have chosen. You submit this in a new conversation on the Consequential Collaboration page. Then, another researcher comes along and picks up from where you left off, writing a new section in a reply to the thread, and so on until it is finished.
Of course, it may help for the first person to write a plan of the sections that should be in the entry, or this could be left to the common sense of the person continuing the entry. All editing of things written will take place when the entry is finished and has been submitted to the appropriate review forum.
Evolutionary Collaboration
Again, if you do not know a lot about the subject or are not prepared to do a great deal of research into it, then this form of writing could be for you. You simply post the 'seed' of your idea in a new conversation on the corresponding page, and each successive researcher expands on the idea, forming plans, giving guidelines, until finally a first draft is written, which is followed by a second draft, and so on.
Team Collaboration
Start a new conversation on the Team Collaboration page with the title of the entry you want written, and write down a list of team members that you wish to recruit. A template might be as follows:
Wanted for Team Collaboration on Stephen Hawking entry: 1 researcher to find out about his life from birth to age thirty; 1 researcher to find out about his life from age thirty to present day; 1 researcher to find out about his work and theories; 2 writers to document their findings; 1 editor to check over spelling and grammar; 1 editor to check all the facts.
People then volunteer to be recruited for these posts, and once they are all filled, work begins. Members of the Collaboration team may also be recruited for writing or editing; this may even transpire to be more efficient, but after all, this is purely experimentation.
Peer Review Emulation
Do we already have the best way of creating collaborative guide entries? Well, we can use this method of guide entry creation to find out. Here you should submit entries that you want feedback on in a similar way to peer review.
