View source for How to document a summer academy

''Choosing the right technical workflow for your hybrid publication''

'''[[Vicky De Visser]]'''


==Content creation==
Before planning on how to gather the documentation we had to ask ourselves: what is to be documented? 

There are three different moment where content can be created and has to be documented: 

'''Before the summer academy''' 

Although the academy wasn’t started yet, there was already a lot of content that was generated by the organising staff. They did research, choose a subject, plan schedules and dates, get the word out by printed and online media and process motivations of applicants. It can be good to already document this process. By documenting the organisation flow you can create a base or structure for the upcoming summer school program and it is useful for sharing information about the future academy with applicants. 

'''During the summer academy''' 

During the summer academy different formats of content were provided to the students. Analyse and estimate this before your academy starts. This way you can start looking for a suitable platform where everything can be documented. It wil save you a lot of time after the summer school is finished. 
Organising this summer academy was our first time and we had to learn the hard way. It took us quiet some time to set up a good platform after the summer academy was over. 

For collaborative note taking we experimented with Pirate Pad and Ether Pad. Both are online text editors where different users can take and edit notes in the same document. We really liked these editors.

Pictures were taken both by the organisation as participants. After the academy we had to email every participant several times to ask them to send their pictures. Using a platform that can be used during the academy can make it easier to upload the photo’s or other content at once. 

'''After the summer academy''' 

After the academy is finished, you can ask participants and teachers to write a review. This can be helpful feedback if you want to organise an other one the year after.

==Choosing the right back-end to collect the documentation==
To compile all the content we wanted to bundle co-writing, co-editing and content management all on the same platform. We looked for a back-end where we could do some real time documenting on, that was easy accessible, had a good way of ordering information, had a short learning curve for participants and supported several kinds of mediafiles. 
The lectures, workshops, screenings, excursions, party and exhibition provided a big variety of media such as videos, sound files, notes, images, and code as well as objects and long texts that wouldn’t be suitable for only an online publication. 

For this task we chose to use WikiMedia. It supports the several file formats and is easy editable by different users. It’s easy understandable structure and user guide is beneficial for changing collaborations and teams. This academy we didn’t have the opportunity to test WikiMedia as a back-end and content collector for students to upload their content as a WikiMedia page because we still had to built it. We used it after the academy to gather the information collected by writing emails and uploading code and pictures to a dropbox repository. During this filling of our WikiMedia back-end we encountered several hierarchy and workflow problems.

==Categorisation of the content==

We wanted to sort the documentation to be able to publish a well structured and logic documentation. We sorted the content by categorising the WikiMedia pages. Andre Castro recommended us to use a categorisation system sorted by state, media and topic. 

Because not all media such as videos, sound files and links aren’t suitable for print publication we added a media category so we could divide articles in a suitable print version and not suitable print version. 

It is important to consider that making a structure can inherit the danger of guiding the contributed content too much. Leave space for adding things that weren’t thought of before. 

'''H&D Wiki categories structure:'''

{| class="wikitable" border="0"
|-
|'''State'''
|EditMe

|-
|
|WriteMe

|-
|
|Published

|-
|
|Ready to be published

|-
|'''Media'''
|Print

|-
|
|Web

|-
|'''Topic / Tags'''
|eg Arduino

|-
|
|eg HTML 2 Print

|}

==Co-editing==
After receiving the contributions, the organisation and participants must then select the most viable and implementable ones. The challenge of the selection process is that most submissions are not always useful, have an other hierarchy or are difficult to implement in the publication. Organisations have to deal with the submitted ideas in a very subtle way as throughout the process they don’t want to reject submissions and risk of alienating them which may eventually lead to disengagement.
It’s advised to give the participants a short introduction in how to collect and document the content. This way the organisers can prevent an extensive editing process afterwards. 

Wikimedia let’s users adjust articles and write comments on the changes that were made in an article. Participants have the possibility to go back in time and compare older versions of the same article. This way content will not get lost after over-editing an article. 

==Making the documentation public: publishing==

After building and filling our back-end documentation platform we had to translate the content to a website and print publication format. For print we looked into two options: creating a publication from the website and creating a publication directly from the WikiMedia page. The process will be discussed here. 

===Currently used set-up===
'''Hackers & Designers documentation platform.''' 

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
|Back-End
|WikiMedia Page

|-
|Front-End
|Website of Hackers & Designers

|-
|Print publication
|Generated from the wiki
|}

===Workflow===
organisation > preparation > communication > collaborative note taking and input assembly > editing > publication > printing > distribution  

===Translation Wiki to website===

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
|Pandoc
|translates wiki-markup to the HTML markup language

|-
|Python Scripts
|Initiates several actions

|-
|Lay-out website
|CSS
|}

===Translation Wiki to print===

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
|Pandoc
|translates wiki markup to LaTeX mark-up

|-
|Python Scripts
|Initiates several actions

|-
|LaTeX
|Lay-outing of content from WikiMedia page and generating PDF
|}

[[Category:DIY Manual]]
[[Category:WriteMe]]
[[Category:Print]]