Handbook evolves - moves into Outline

A revised version of a handbook will help to support the evolution of meet. coop into a partnership with WebTV https://forum.meet.coop/t/evolution-1-find-a-new-home/1293/.

  • On one hand, transparent protocols of collaboration and operating practices
  • On the other, mission, vision & principles of meet.coop and ongoing arrangements for governance & stewardship in the evolving, federated commons of digital means.

Alongside this forum, the handbook is one of the primary media spaces of meet. coop https://forum.meet.coop/tag/media-space. In the present topic we track the move into Oultine, a libre software container now being adopted to hold a handbook. Related threads: https://forum.meet.coop/c/org-circle/handbook-design/39

Trial handbook @ gitBook/Obsidian/Discourse: For a couple of years a handbook has been seen as potentially important for meet. coop. A trial handbook - rather incomplete - has been piloted in gitBook - this is being taken down (April 2023). We no longer want to use a proprietary container, which initially was convenient but also expensive. Temporarliy the content is being archived in Obsidian Obsidian Publish. The tool is nice to use (built on an easily accessed, transparent Markdown document repo) and read/write tools are open source, but web publishing of Obsidian can only be done via their proprietary service. This service too will be taken down in due course, when Outline is established.

During 2022 this forum was expanded to include a handbook category, partly following the approach of Resonate Protocols for documentation - #11 by Hakanto @Hakanto . The category is partly populated as you can see but this approach feels a bit awkward, and we returned to searching for a handbook-oriented container which has very clean navigation and unlimited nesting of sections. Discourse only allows one level of sub-category, and using just tags for navigation doesn’t work particularly well for something hierarchical (which is one way of using a handbook). As a workhorse with masses of plugins, Discourse begins to feel klunky in this usage?

Outline @ Autonomic: The virtues are promoted by the vendor here: https://www.getoutline.com/. Virtues include: automatic creation of backlinks, nesting of pages in a hierarchy of any depth, a clean nav sidebar, ‘collections’ (equivalent to Discourse categories, including access control), full Markdown compatibility, editors’ access via Single Sign On, smooth collaborative editing, change logging, integration with Diagrams.net and Alfred integration under MacOS . The manual is here: Guide. Outline will be hosted for meet.coop by Autonomic.coop using the recipe from the coop.cloud library. Migration should start end-April 2023, with a view to supporting the emerging collboration between meet. coop @evolution and WebTV @gcotnoir .

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