I just wanted to quickly dump a few thoughts about a big event we’re about to run. I’ve been slipping behind in my blogging and thought I’d inflict a quick core dump on you.

Tomorrow (7^th May 2011) we are holding a translation hackathon at the University of Stellenbosch. The objective is extremely ambitious, translate the Grade 10 Mathematics and Physical Science FHSST texts into Afrikaans in one day. We’ve been discussing this possibility for a long time and we finally thought we’d just have a crack at it.

The pressure had been mounting after we were given some airtime on an Afrikaans radio station, Radio Sonder Grense. We were contacted by a number of people wanting to help translate. We had 3 people start doing this virtually but we didn’t make much progress. Most were unfamiliar with the platform and the books and it wasn’t our focus so they got a little lost and gave up. It allowed to start thinking about the process and begin preparing some documentation and workgroups for translation on Connexions.

Then we finally had someone volunteer who was familiar with markup languages and felt comfortable translating the raw Connexions XML, Carl Scheffler. Carl translated 3 chapters into Afrikaans and gave us the first real estimates for how long a chapter should take someone who is comfortable looking at a markup language and confident to do the translation, our average chapter length should take one man day for a first pass translation.

This was the information we needed to proceed, we contact Thinus Booysen, a programming lecturer at Stellenbosch just to see if he’d be prepared to mention it to his class. Thinus jumped straight in and practically organised the participants, formal approval and a venue. So the die was cast!

Given our experiences with regular hackathons, the failed translation attempts and the fact that the translation hackathon is to be a completely new process we’ve tried to put some things into place to mitigate the risk of failure but also ensure that the event has the most meaning for the participants. It is a once-off event so we must get it right.

Event Structure

We know that we need to process people very effectively when they arrive. I’m sure this is obvious but still a challenge, everyone needs extremely clear, simple instructions; they need to be quickly and simply made aware of all the necessary processes, structures and they need to be made as comfortable as possible.

The layout of the room and other visual cues assist in this. They must be channeled to one person who makes sure they’re made to feel welcome, relevant and able to participate. The team must be either introduced to everyone (possibly impractical) or very easily identifiable.

We’re not going to begin with a presentation but actually create a sprint-like working atmosphere to get the ball rolling. The introductory presentation will actually be delay until 1.5 hours after start time by which time everyone should definitely have started working. It seems that if people have to wait until a critical mass has arrived and then sit through a presentation, the uncertainty about the actual process (regardless of the presentation info) builds up and people become frustrated. So our refined instructions should allow everyone to get started on actual translation work without a presentation or much background information.

Community Aspects

We want people, many of whom have never met, to feel as much part of a team and like they are achieving something. To help people get a sense of the team and its progress we’ve developed a small tool to produce a webpage that iterates through all chapters highlighting with a progress bar the state and showing a photograph and name of the translator.

This will be projected on the screen and is linked to a progress spreadsheet which will be continuously updated. Every time it is changed a small script will update the webpage. Anyone will be able to see at any given time how we are making progress as a team who is working on what chapter. This is useful because many chapters build on concepts etc. from previous chapters so there will need to be interaction between translators to answer questions like which word was used for this, how precisely was this defined etc.

The progress webpage will be live here from 9am (GMT+02:00) tomorrow.

Focus Groups

One thing we know is no matter how well prepared we think we are things can go wrong, so we tested our process with a small focus group. The focus group lasted an afternoon and had people who had never used the site before involved. It gave us a great perspective on how ready we were and how volunteers would behave.

One area we’ve had some problems is the performance of the site, this has led to us prototyping other editors etc. We tried to commission a lightweight editor that would allow translator to only edit the proper text and forbid changes to the markup. Unfortunately this hasn’t been completed in time. This is the one tool that could really streamline translation and we feel that it is worth building even after our event is complete.

Risk

There are two primary risks, both technical. There is a very real possibility we’ll have editing issues on the site (there seems to be a dodgy proxy-server between us and Connexions that regularly caches a corrupt javascript file and it doesn’t respect refresh requests). To mitigate this I will download all the modules from Connexions early tomorrow morning and people can just translate in any text editor.

The other risk has to do with technical aspects related to the language used. To mitigate this we do have a number of Mathematics and Science educators coming who teach in Afrikaans. It will be important to iterate rapidly in the first hour having them give each translator feedback on a section or two to get them into the right groove.

Anticipated Outcomes

In addition to translating a lot of content we hope to create a mini-documentary video that highlights both the process, the successes and the volunteers who made it possible. We’ll be doing a video interview with everyone who is willing and then try to put up a video in the next week.

If all goes well we’ll have two Afrikaans textbooks next week and a video of how it all came about.

It came to pass recently that we (and by we I mean just short of 100 volunteers from all over the world!) edited the Free High Schools Science Texts (FHSST) textbooks in the space of 9 days. The situation arose suddenly and unexpectedly. FHSST had been completely idle since mid-2007 when version 0 was released. Our original intention was to ramp up activities during September 2010 to “leisurely” improve the books so that we could announce a much better, version 1, late this year or very early next year. I have included a few quotes from volunteers telling us why they got involved.

I got involved because you asked me ;) But in all seriousness, I love projects like this – I like what they stand for and I am always willing to give of my time and energy for a worthy cause. I can only reach so many children in the classroom, but to be able to reach more in this indirect way is very powerful.

How it came about

I am have a Fellowship from the Shuttleworth Foundation but was originally hired as a project manager to extend FHSST to all grades and subjects, a project we called Siyavula. As part of Siyavula we acquired a full set of workbooks (with teachers guides etc.) for all learning areas for Grades R-9 in English and Afrikaans (about 30 000 pages) which we released under an open copyright licence. We’ve had a DVD with it all on in Word format that we have been giving to people to try to drive uptake etc. and raise awareness of the benefits of open educational resources. We included a copy of the FHSST PDF files just because there was room on the DVD.

There are two reasons: Firstly I firmly believe that knowledge belongs to all human kind, and that everyone has the right to get the best education available. Secondly I learned about the project from the post of Tom Leinster on the n-category café, which is reason enough for me to take a closer look.

At some point we gave a copy to Beeld, hoping that it would be useful to them as a supplement for their Leer en Presteer section. To the best of our knowledge, they passed it on to someone at Die Burger who passed it on to someone at the Department of Basic Education (DBE). The end result being a series of phone calls to us, completely out of the blue, about the resources and specifically the FHSST books. The DBE representatives were thinking of distributing the material because of the strike but could we check it quickly.

Given that we’ve released it under an open licence and we can’t stop people distributing it, we felt compelled to do our best to improve what went out.

What we did

Figuratively speaking we were caught with our pants down! We were in the middle of reworking the FHSST website and hadn’t actually done any work on FHSST in ages. In fact, up until a few days before the call the book compilation hadn’t actually worked on the site. Despite this we set out to edit all of the FHSST textbooks in the space of 9 days.

I believe in people helping each other, sharing knowledge for the greater good.

Our goal was simple, have at least two people read every chapter looking for factual errors and small style and grammar corrections and then fix them. Large edits or the rewriting of entire sections would have to wait until we had more time.

At first we planned on running hackathons continuously at the Open Innovation Studio (OIS). This would mean getting as many volunteers into one space where people could edit paper copies of the FHSST books and then hand their edits in to a number of ‘LaTeX gatekeepers’ who would edit the book source. (This isn’t because we don’t trust people but rather that we have very few volunteers that are comfortable with LaTeX.)

We identified a list of possible editors and started sending out emails. We had many positive responses but many people couldn’t drop their day-to-day activities to come and sit with us at the OIS. We also received a number of expressions of interest from further afield.

Previously we had discussed a.nnotate.com amongst the Shuttleworth Foundation Fellows (see Steve Song’s blog on annotate-ipedia) as it could be a super tool for educational purposes. We’ve never had any time to explore that possibility fully.

The distributed enthusiasm and capacity needed to be harnessed to achieve our goal and we felt that a.nnotate.com would provide a platform to capture edits very effectively. We uploaded all the books onto a.nnotate.com and made a more general call for help. We called for help from scientists and mathematicians for editing capacity. We were fortunate enough to have the call echoed by Mark Shuttleworth himself. We did ask people to help out by coordinating their reading through us to make sure that every chapter got read twice by independent editors. a.nnotate.com would allow a complete free-for-all which we wouldn’t mind if not for our deadline.

I’m a supporter of open source software and interested in carrying this over into the academic sphere.

Volunteers

The response to the call was impressive and we were very excited about the amount of enthusiasm and the qualifications of those that stepped up to help. The breakdown of contributor qualifications, those that responded to our information request, is (counting PhD candidates as having an MS):

Our average contributor is a PhD candidate in one of Physics, Mathematics or Chemistry. A number of Professors contributed which was also very exciting.

The ability to manage hundreds of potential contributors continuously using a.nnotate.com meant that, with a little coordination, we could hopefully edit everything. The process began at 14:00 on Wednesday 25^th August. The editors posted comments at a phenomenal rate and we eventually had to turn some people away because everything had been read multiple times.

One of the biggest costs for schools is up-to-date and accurate textbooks. I believe that having open, freely available textbooks can help avoid these costs.

The total number of annotations in the books as a function of the day was:

This includes responses to comments from those capturing changes in the LaTeX. The huge number of responses would have been completely unmanageable on paper given the time that we had available to us.

Outcome

Thanks to a phenomenal response we were able to email new versions (version 0.5) of the books to the DBE on the 3^rd September. In writing this blog I realised that it was an incredibly stupid thing to even attempt and I’m still amazed that we were able to successfully complete the task, all due to the generosity of volunteers. These books have been featured prominently on the official DBE portal Thutong. This is quite a coup for us, not only did we improve the books significantly as well as capture a large number of suggestions about further improvements and the enthusiastic response from volunteers has raised our enthusiasm levels significantly.

I’ve benefitted a lot from open-source software and similar community-driven projects. I feel the FHSST project is an ideal way for me to make a contribution.

What comes next?

We’ve learnt that using a.nnotate.com provides a lot of flexibility and enables discussion around errata in the precise context in the book. The future method of capturing errata for the FHSST books will be to use a.nnotate.com:

• people can see if an errata has already been submitted – without trying to search a forum or database in some obscure way and worrying about using the right keywords etc.
• people can highlight the error visually and add any comment
• annotations accept replies – which is the only requirement for people to have a discussion

We know that the books are not perfect, even after such a massive editing effort but we’ve got a good few leads on areas where they can be improved. Apart from a more methodical review of the suggestions and comments submitted during the editing marathon we would like to improve the books significantly. There are a few ways we can do this:

1. Add more worked examples where the books are light on them – we have received a lot of positive feedback regarding the inclusion of worked examples.
2. Develop model solutions for all the non-worked example exercises included in the books.
3. Develop teachers’ guides so that the books are more teacher- and curriculum-friendly.
4. Integrate multi-media online OERs into the online versions of the books. A chapter/section might:
   1. begin with a Khan Academy conceptual explanation
   2. have a set of powerpoint slides developed into a slidecast by a South African teacher
   3. provide the PhET Simulation allowing learners to experiment and play with the concepts before embarking on the worked examples for a particular concept helping develop their intuition
   4. each exercise will include a shortened url to allow the learner to navigate to the full model solution on FullMarks where learners could find many more problems to practice on

The first step is to complete the model solutions for all the questions in the books. We have revived the hackathons at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and this is where volunteers have started. After ironing out the kinks with volunteers in the same room we’ve refined the process in such a way that hackathons and remote contributions to this proces can be accommodated. You can read about the first hackathon here and the second one here, or see more photos on our Facebook page.

Ideal Process:

1. Access books on a.nnotate.com (links available on http://www.markhorner.net):
   Mathematics Grade 10: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=SHkkygd2

   Mathematics Grade 11: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=dHbcYbbw

   Mathematics Grade 12: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=M4p01euS

   Physical Science Grade 10: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=3sCc82qY

   Physical Science Grade 11: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=hW2hgnQP

   Physical Science Grade 12: http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-10-08&c=enzaEmdn

2. Select an exercise in any book that has no solution and no annotation about a solution on FullMarks
3. Highlight the question and an annotation window pops up – annotate the question saying that you are working on a solution
4. Create a question on FullMarks with the full step-by-step model solution and finalise it (see details a bit later for some guidance on this)
5. View your finalised question and answer on FullMarks – copy the url
6. Return to a.nnotate.com and add the url you copied to the annotation in the book that you created in step 3
7. Log in to www.fhsst.org (this is at the very bottom of the FHSST page)
8. Create a short url by going to www.fhsst.org/shorten selecting “Shorten url” option from the menu and pasting the full question url into the box and submitting
9. Copy the resulting code from the short url (i.e. just copy XYZ when the short url is www.fhsst.org/answers/XYZ) and add this to the annotation in the book as well
10. Return to step 1. and repeat for another question

This will ensure that we have a short code to redirect learners to a full model solution for every question in the book. They will also then be able to see similar questions on FullMarks as well. We have adapted this slightly for the hackathons but always ensuring that the files on a.nnotate.com have the latest information regarding what has been and is being worked on.

This will ensure that we have a short code to redirect learners to a full model solution for every question in the book. They will also then be able to see similar questions on FullMarks as well.

I’m very passionate about the problem of affordable textbooks (and academic publishing more generally), especially in maths. I came from an underprivileged background and I know there are many brilliant people out there who have no opportunity to flourish due to lack of materials. I also have a friend in a third-world country (PNG) who is a teacher, and I could imagine the benefit he would derive from a textbook scheme as you have organised in South Africa.

Once this is complete we will turn to suggestions and improvements related to the conceptual explanations incorporation, where appropriate, links to the Khan Academy videos and the PHET Simulations. From there we can develop the teachers’ guides and submit the books to the formal review process at the DBE for inclusion on the approved books list. Should they be included schools will be able to purchase FHSST textbooks as part of the official procurement process but at approximately 1/5 of the cost of publishers alternatives.

Just a quick post to let people know that the FHSST v0.5 books are up on a.nnotate.com – this is primarily to support hackathons but will also be used to capture errata and suggestions.

The links to the books are:

• Mathematics Grade 10
• Mathematics Grade 11
• Mathematics Grade 12
• Physical Science Grade 10
• Physical Science Grade 11
• Physical Science Grade 12

We’re on a mission to get the FHSST books completely proof-read by next week. We were doing a lot manually which required people be in Cape Town if they wanted to help out but we’ve since uploaded the books to a.nnotate.com where anyone in the world can browse and annotate errors etc. so you can help from anywhere you have an internet connection.

We’d still like to coordinate efforts to make sure we cover all chapters well. Volunteer editors should email Bridget Nash [ bridget AT siyavula DOT org DOT za ] to find out where we’re still a bit thin.

Here are the links to take a look – but please coordinate with Bridget if you’re going to contribute:

Physical Science Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Our schools are struggling due to the nation wide strike. Learning needs to continue at the schools, many of whom are running on skeleton crews. A group of volunteers have authored a set of open source textbooks and resources that can to support learners and educators in this time. The open copyright license allows the government to distribute it openly at the cost of printing it.

These Grade 10 – 12 Mathematics and Science books need a final review before it will be accepted and distributed by the Department of Education. We have 10 days to complete the review and would like to call on all mathematicians and scientists for help.

Which mathematician and scientists?

The subject matter is Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry at high school level. We need volunteers who have post-graduate degrees in Maths, Physics, Chemistry or related fields and are willing to serve their country.

What do we have to do?

It is quite simple, we need to proof-read the books and correct any errors. The curriculum is covered, there are enough worked examples but there are a few errors which we need to find and fix. If time permits we can also simplify language and add more worked examples but this is secondary.

How we plan on doing it.

Volunteers can join us for one or many of the following slots at the Open Innovation Studio (27 Buitenkant Street in Cape Town) where we will be working through the books. Alternatively volunteers can receive material and provide feedback by e-mail. Volunteers will read a section, correct it and submit it for capturing. We want every section read by two independent people to reduce the possibility of errors slipping through.

We will provide copies of the material to be edited, food (lunch or dinner), drinks and a superb atmosphere.

We have 1800 pages to read and we estimate that we need at least 6 people for each of Maths, Chemistry and Physics to complete the process. A final editor will be used for each of the books as a third and final check.

Update – We were doing a lot manually which required people be in Cape Town if they wanted to help out but we’ve since uploaded the books to a.nnotate.com where anyone in the world can browse and annotate errors etc. so you can help from anywhere you have an internet connection.

We’d still like to coordinate efforts to make sure we cover all chapters well. Volunteer editors should email Bridget Nash [ bridget AT siyavula DOT org DOT za ] to find out where we’re still a bit thin.

Here are the links to take a look – but please coordinate with Bridget if you’re going to contribute:

Physical Science Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Physical Science Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 12 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 11 on Annotate.com

Mathematics Grade 10 on Annotate.com

Time slots

Contact us

Mark Horner: mark.horner@shuttleworthfoundation.org / 083 564 6272
or
Neels van der Westhuizen: neels@siyavula.org.za / 082 334 3259

More Details:

www.fhsst.org
www.siyavula.org.za
www.fullmarks.org.za
www.markhorner.net
qa.openpress.co.za
www.shuttleworthfoundation.org

The Free High School Science Texts (FHSST)

In 2002 we started a volunteer project to write right free high school science textbooks (www.fhsst.org). This took 5 years and we which took 5 years. We finished the first versions of the books in 2007 and haven’t touched them much since then. The books are released under an open copyright licence which allows for the legal adaptation, enhancement and distribution of the books.

We were planning on beginning to work through the books correcting errata and developing full model solutions so that we could release a new version in January. Model solutions would be put on another project we have developed FullMarks (www.fullmarks.org.za) which is to be launched this coming Friday 27th August.

The Siyavula Workbooks

We bought out a small curriculum development company that had developed a set of workbooks with teachers’ guides, lesson plans and work schedules covering all of Grades R-9 in both English and Afrikaans. We now own the copyright to the material which is released under an open copyright licence which makes it legal for people to copy, adapt, distribute and enhance the books.

The idea of testing crowdsourcing against a more traditional design process came up last year (you can read about it here) and we decided to do an experiment as we needed new covers for the two sets of Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) textbooks.

The crowdsourced covers from 99Designs came in first (featured in this blog post):

Here are the full sets of covers for you to compare (you can leave your opinions about which win in the comments if you like):

Grade 10

Grade 11

Grade 12

Results

To be honest, I prefer the crowdsourced Physical Science covers but, in the interests of full disclosure, I managed that process. I am quite happy with the Mathematics covers. If we had had different designers as part of either process the results could have been different so this is certainly not a definite test with a control group but a little subjectivity makes for better coffee-time debate.

Obviously, the key thing to an end product you can live with is how you manage the process no matter which route you go. I have discovered I am very bad at working with an individual designer on a single project. I find it difficult to articulate what I want and what it is that I like and don’t like. These things make me a difficult client, although I feel this is mitigated slightly by the fact that I’m aware of it.

99Designs competitions are more tolerant of my choices and I feel that some designers seem to be able to figure wear I’m going based on what I rate designs and what designs I eliminate. I’ve started to standardise my own process for running competitions on 99Designs.

Competition

• The competition benefits from designers competing and feeding off each other – if you run a blind contest (where designers cannot see each others entries) you’ll lose out on the complex feedback between different design ideas and will basically be running about 30 individual design processes, requiring a lot more feedback and time. If you’re a bad client (like myself) that struggles to give good feedback this will really be difficult.
• For the first 3 days don’t give a rating higher than 3 stars – no matter how much you like the design. Immediately after launching the competition make a comment to this effect otherwise designers will get unhappy. They’ll grumble but live with it if they know it is your policy. If you don’t comment and do it they’ll just think you’re being difficult. You may well find something you really think you like in the first 48 hours but those strong, early contenders have always faded out as the feedback starts to take place.
• Provide feedback often – everyday – the competition only lasts 7 days but will take a couple of hours a day. If you don’t put effort into getting a design you like why should the designers – they don’t have to live with it.
• Prepay the contest – then 99Designs holds the money – you can still get it back but many designers won’t even consider participating if the competition isn’t prepaid. If you are serious about getting a design and have a budget then prove it.
• Once there are a couple of days left AND some designs you could live with – guarantee the contest – this way you can’t get the money back and must choose a winner – but its an added incentive to the designers to get involved. Many of the best seem to wait until the last 48 hours before entering.
• If designs conflict with the brief – eliminate them – and comment to that effect. Don’t let them hang around. If you hate it – eliminate! The competition feeds on what doesn’t get eliminated and on what gets rated highly.
• Give designers you rate individual feedback on their design – not in the general comments section. Don’t pick an individual designers idea and ask everyone to work on something like that.
• Put general feed back or changes to brief in general comments section.
• Don’t be put out if they moan a bit about your poor design choices, it is your design content after all. If they mail you privately just say that you are following the rules and they should go through the competition page – do NOT argue with them about design, especially not privately. Keep it on the competition page.

Brief (this is for a logo design competition)

Give yourself reasons to eliminate the rubbish easily by including things like:

• no drop shadows
• no gradients
• no 3D effects
• no stock images
• no proprietary fonts (otherwise you have to purchase)
• at most 2 colours (maybe 3 ;)
• logo must scale down
• logo must work in B&W
• should be balanced
• colour logo must be presented on white background (if they start
  using textured backgrounds to make the logo look good it is hard to
  compare etc.)

Thats all before you even say anything about what you are looking for. You can easily find much more comprehensive lists for rules for logo design competitions with a quick search online.

Then tell them what you want and include:

• project elevator pitch and link to site or descriptive material if
  you have.

• icon and/or word together
• ideas of colours if you have any
• whether icon should stand on its own
• ideas of fonts

Make sure you ask for:

• Colour version
• B&W version
• Vector files (I’d ask for .ai and .svg files)

I think that crowdsourcing is also a lot more fun than dealing with a single designer and you really do see a lot of different concepts in a very short space of time. I’m sure there is an argument to be made that a longer process might lead a more mature result but I’m sure a counter-argument exists built on intensity and focus for the person running the competition. Ultimately, as with everything in life, you have to make your own decisions and live with them. Luckily taking a chance on a logo for $500 isn’t very risky and worth a shot. The more you pay the more attention you get but for $500 for a logo design I am barely able to keep up with my day job and the competition.

I have finally upgraded the FHSST website to Drupal 6.15. This took me a lot longer than expected because the year got off to a completely rampant start and “spare” time just didn’t exist. I also had fallen very far behind on Drupal upgrades so I had to start with an upgrade to Drupal 5.

Now we can revisit the new functionality I mentioned in a previous blog. The idea was to make it much easier for people to submit errata and manage the corrections, submit contributions and capture testimonials. This will require significant theme changes which is why the site is currently using the default Drupal theme.

I’ve learnt not to even attempt to suggest deadlines for the new functionality to be rolled out and the new theme designed and implemented but it’ll be there as soon as I can get it up. The functionality was being looked into by Telementa and I hope to resurrect that as it seemed like the functionality would be quite quick and simple for them to implement. The bottleneck was myself upgrading the site to Drupal 6.

We’ve chosen the covers for the science textbooks as part of our experiment of using crowdsourcing versus traditional design. We’re still waiting for the traditional design covers to come in for the maths books but I thought I’d share the science ones so long.

We had many submissions and there were some great ones but these were the most popular amongst members of the FHSST and OpenPress teams. I’ll write up a more detailed follow-up post when we’ve got the maths ones in.

We need much better management of the feedback we receive for the Free High School Science Texts project. It needs to be simple and fast and allow us to manage it easily. To help with this we’re looking to have a small feedback module written for the site. We’ll use it once we’ve upgraded the site to Drupal 6.x.

I’m looking for some development quotes and thought I might get some additional exposure if I post the draft specification on my blog. If you’re a Drupal person and would like to have a crack at this feel free to contact me with any clarifying questions or a quote for the work. I intend to make a decision by the middle of next week (18th November) so you’ve got a week to get the information to me.

FHSST Feedback Module

The FHSST site allows authors to build books in LaTeX. The original goal was to have many LaTeX-competent authors working on many sections. We have learnt that very few people are comfortable with LaTeX and PSTricks. To better accommodate people who still want to make contributions but not get their hands dirty we must provide a simple way to give the necessary input.

We would like a feedback module to be written for Drupal to help with this. This module should allow three types of feedback:

1. errata

2. suggested contributions

3. testimonials

Errata

Each erratum needs to contain:

• erratum title (mandatory)

• detailed erratum information (mandatory)

• book for which it is submitted (mandatory)

• book version for which erratum is applicable (mandatory)

• book section in which error occurs (mandatory)

• book page number (optional)

• submitter’s:

  • name and surname (mandatory)

  • email address (mandatory)

  • role, one of:

    • learner

    • educator

    • parent

    • other

• timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)

• status (only changeable by coordinator – starts in pending):

  • pending

  • corrected

  • disputed

• timestamp of resolution (i.e. corrected or disputed state change – recorded automatically)

• person changing state (recorded automatically)

When submitted, an erratum must go into a queue and the coordinators of the relevant book should receive an email notification that it has been submitted. They can then login and review the erratum. Once they have processed it they must be able to set it to either corrected or disputed in the case where the erratum is actually incorrect.

A page should be provided where users can see all errata submitted, the submitters’ name, the relevant book and version, and the status of the errata. The title should link to the full erratum view.

A block should be provided where users can see the 5 most recent errata submitted (title, book and status).

Suggested Contributions

This is to allow general users to submit a contribution to be included in the book by a LaTeX-enabled author. Each contribution should have:

• contribution title (mandatory)

• detailed contribution (mandatory)

• attached files (optional)

• book for which it is submitted (mandatory)

• book section (optional)

• submitter’s:

  • name and surname (mandatory)

  • email address (mandatory)

  • role, one of:

    • learner

    • educator

    • parent

    • other

• timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)

• status (only changeable by coordinator – starts in pending):

  • pending

  • incorporated

  • discarded

• timestamp of resolution (i.e. incorporated or discarded state change to be recorded automatically)

• person changing state (recorded automatically)

When submitted a contribution must go into a queue and the coordinators of the relevant book should receive an email notification that it has been submitted. They can then login and review the contribution. Once they have processed it they set it to either incorporated or discarded state in the case where the contribution cannot be used.

A page should be provided where users can see all contributions submitted, the submitters’ name, the relevant book and version, and the status of the contribution. The title should link to the full contribution view.

A block should be provided where users can see the 5 most recent contributions submitted (title, book and status).

Testimonials

This is simply to collect information about how the content has been used.

• testimonial title (mandatory)

• detailed testimonial (mandatory)

• book for which it is submitted (optional)

• book section (optional)

• submitter’s:

  • name and surname (mandatory)

  • email address (mandatory)

  • role, one of: (mandatory)

    • learner

    • educator

    • parent

    • other

• timestamp of submission (recorded automatically)

Administration

For the feedback module the books for which feedback is being received need to be configured. This should happen from the module administration page and not depend on the book module of Drupal. The administrator will add the books for the module and then add, on a book-by-book basis:

• versions

• chapters and sections

• coordinators

When a book is added at least one version number is required. For each version number provided, a list of chapters and sections is required. A book will have multiple versions, each with their own unique chapter and section listing. This listing can be a simple textarea where each line is a chapter or section heading.

Each book must also have a list of coordinators who are users on the system. Coordinators should be able to access a list of all errata and contributions for their books. They should be able to view them and change the status if necessary. The time when the status is changed should be recorded.

Special Remarks

All the feedback types should be node types and should integrate into the Drupal CMS properly so that they can be integrated with other modules designed to manipulate nodes. The theming information should also be separated so that they can be re-themed.

A special page should be provided that can be used as the homepage. This page should have a customisable body of full html and then have forms for all three feedback types. This will be presented to non-authenticated users as the homepage allowing them to provide the feedback directly from the front page. We would like jQuery/jQuery UI integration in this page so that a button can be shown for each type of feedback and if clicked the form must render as a modal window. Submission using these forms should be via AJAX and should trigger an update on the blocks for the content types if they are shown.

To simplify the forms when a user selects a book the relevant versions should be loaded. Once the version is selected only the relevant sections should be loaded. Validation for all form fields should be implemented.

The module should be written in such a way to conform to the Drupal 6.X API and should only have dependencies on well established modules (modules that are actively maintained and have demonstrable support and traction within the Drupal community).

We would release all the code under the Gnu General Public Licence.

As part of the launch of OpenPress, the FHSST Grade 10 Mathematics book is getting printed. We felt that we needed a fresh set of covers for the books. They will be printed with a colour cover and we felt that the all the Maths covers should have a theme; similarly for the Physical Science books.

The covers will need to be available in the next 10 days or so and we were discussing the best way to get them done. The obvious way to go is to commission the work from a designer and go with that. We also considered the option of crowdsourcing the covers and have had a lot of debate about the merits of crowdsourcing.

To resolve the issue, once and for all (maybe), we’ve decided to run our own internal competition. The prize will be bragging rights as the optimal process for future covers for OpenPress / FHSST texts. We are going to allocate the same budget to the Maths and Physical Science covers, but we are going to have the Maths set commissioned by a regular design firm and we’ll get the Physical Science ones created on 99Designs.

Although it isn’t really a competition it will be fun to see the results. The only way to keep the results comparable is to give both processes the same:

• budget,
• brief,
• quantity and quality of feedback, and
• the same timeline.

I’ll post the brief a little later and the results as well so you can decide which you think is the best set and whether we’ve chosen the best process based on this little experiment. If nothing else this should be fun.