[okfn-coord] [Fwd: Re: A proposal]

Tue May 13 03:27:25 UTC 2008

Just a quick note to let you guys knows that I've been corresponding 
with Jason Turgeon of Textbook Revolution and Ben Crowell of Light and 
Matter, about how we can work more closely. We hope to pool together 
information about textbooks, including license information, so that we 
are not doubling up our efforts. Open Text Book will (of course) remain 
much as it is - but hopefully we'll be able to pull in a few more open 
textbooks from a common source - as well as share back our listings with 
other textbook projects.

Jonathan

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: A proposal
Date: 	Sun, 11 May 2008 00:23:00 -0400
From: 	Jason Turgeon <jason at textbookrevolution.org>
To: 	Ben Crowell <crowell08 at lightandmatter.com>
CC: 	Joshua Gay <joshuagay at gmail.com>, Jonathan Gray 
<jonathan.gray at okfn.org>
References: 
<264c3b0c0805081521g1e2fc8f2q73986c67b3f155f6 at mail.gmail.com> 
<20080509164012.GA33566 at lightandmatter.com>

Hi Ben-

Great to hear you're open to collaboration!  Thanks for the response.  
I'll discuss with Josh and Jonathon and over the next couple of months 
we'll figure out something that works for everyone, both from a user 
standpoint and a tech standpoint.

Thanks!

Jason

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Ben Crowell 
<crowell08 at lightandmatter.com <mailto:crowell08 at lightandmatter.com>> wrote:

    Hi Jason,

    On Thu, May 08, 2008 at 06:21:18PM -0400, Jason Turgeon wrote:
     > As you might know, Textbook Revolution is about to become a wiki,
    where
     > anyone can come to add or update info about a free online
    textbook.  Users
     > will also be able to add reviews, and we'll have a way for
    professors to
     > share when they adopt a book for their classes.
     >
     > So in some sense, it seems that we are moving closer to the way
    your site
     > works--we'll have more complete information on licenses, reviews,
    etc.  But
     > we still want to keep our focus more narrowly focused on
    textbooks than the
     > broader topics you also cover.
     >
     > The new site will be more open than my current site, too, with a
    CC-BY
     > license.
     >
     > So here's my pitch--is there some way we can collaborate with you
    to share
     > books and reviews where appropriate so that we're not duplicating
    each
     > other's efforts?  We all really respect the work you've done and
    you were
     > one of the inspirations behind me starting down this whole path.
     It would
     > be great to find a way to get the sites to work more closely
    together,
     > either by merging the educational books portion of the two sites
    or perhaps
     > finding a way to have reviews and book listings cross-post.
     >
     > I'm also working on Jonathon Gray at opentextbook.org
    <http://opentextbook.org> to do something
     > similar.  My idea is that the less we duplicate effort, the more
    we can move
     > this cause forward.

    The code that The Assayer runs on is all open-source
    (http://www.theassayer.org/cgi-bin/ashelp.cgi),
    and the reviews are all OPL licensed. I can't remember now whether I
    have a dump
    of the database created by a cron job that is publicly available,
    but if that
    would be useful, I'd be happy to set it up. So for instance if you
    want to set
    up some kind of a mechanism to offer users the option of
    automatically cross-posting
    reviews onto textbook revolution, it would be fine with me if you
    dug into my
    perl code and submitted a patch to accompish that. I'll warn you
    that it's the
    first thing I ever wrote in perl, so it's pretty crufty.

    As far as duplication of effort ... it costs me very little effort
    these days to
    run The Assayer, so it's not a big issue to me. The main effort is
    examining
    new book listings and reviews to make sure they're within my rules.
    E.g.,
    I'll get new user John Smith adding a book by John Smith to the
    database, and
    then adding a review. The book turns out not to be free online, and
    the review
    is his own blurb. So then I have to delete the book and review from
    the database.
    No big deal.

           Ben

-- 
----------------------------------------
Projects I'm involved with:
Day job @ EPA, water & energy nexus: 
http://www.epa.gov/waterinfrastructure/bettermanagement_energy.html
Publisher @ Textbook Revolution: http://textbookrevolution.org/
Blogs I contribute to:
green music blog #1: http://green-base.blogspot.com/
green music blog #2: 
http://www.melodytrip.com/Community/blogs/jasonturgeon/default.aspx
green contributor @ http://www.leanblog.org/
The Stingy Scholar http://stingyscholar.blogspot.com/