This week, Coko hosted a webinar focused on Editoria. Many attendees participated in the live broadcast, which included a Q&A session, in addition to the Editoria origin story, live demonstration, and a presentation on open source sustainability.
Watch the webinar in full here:
There has never been a tool quite like Editoria.
Several elements make Editoria unique, setting it far apart from open and proprietary tools that came before it. It was designed by subject matter experts and actual users! And the ability to author, edit, style, typeset and output books in browsers is revolutionary! The efficiencies that university presses and library publishers realize as a result of automated production and typesetting workflows add up to significant opportunities to scale output of monographs and other urgent academic works. All these benefits rest atop an open source infrastructure that places the academy in the driver’s seat. This is very different from working with third-party vendors who control the roadmap while locking presses in.
Still, one of the most important components of open source software is community. Communities support adopters, developers and users. Healthy communities operate in good faith, with transparency and trust, and the whole ecosystem benefits.
Here are some actions you can take today if you’d like to get involved in the Editoria community. Whether your interest is passive, or you are considering adding resources to the project, here are some ideas to get you started:
The Editoria landscape is changing fast. You’ll want to know who’s adopting, what’s rolling out, where adopters are speaking, and when a new website is launching (hint: it includes a sandbox you can immediately use to experience Editoria first hand, with no setup required)! The simplest way to do this is to sign up for the Coko Foundation’s Editoria mailing list.
Editoria webinars are a fast and interactive way to come up to speed on how and why Editoria was created, as well as on the organizations involved. Hear about the problems Editoria solves directly from the founding adopters and users themselves. Interact directly with the team during Q & A. Sign up to attend!
Community members are taking Editoria on the road this spring! Check out the Events schedule for a full listing of our meeting participation. Let us know if you’d like to meet up!
Check on the health and vibrance of our community within our gitlab repository and mattermost chat channel. Fair warning: many smart people working on and discussing really interesting things in a fun and collaborative manner. 🙂
Coko Co-Founder Adam Hyde literally wrote the book on Open Source Collaborative Product Development. It is following this method that University of California Press’ Editorial and Production staff designed Editoria! The Cabbage Tree Method (CTM for short) emphasizes that the subject matter experts, those who will use the tool themselves, drive the decision-making during a facilitated collaborative design process:
“A fundamental rule of CTM is that no one speaks for the users, other than the users themselves.”
Also, this text was the first published Editoria output!
If you like what you see, please let me know? I’m new to the Community Manager role and I am interested to talk with others who are new to Editoria, the community, Coko, and share perspectives. I’d love to learn about your organization, current workflows, and future directions. I can also help you strategize next steps for evaluating your interest or increasing your involvement.
There are several ways to keep up with Coko and Editoria on social media. Here they are:
Editoria on Twitter
Coko Foundation on the web
Coko Foundation on Twitter
Coko Foundation on Linked In
p.s. Maybe bookmark this page as an updated Editoria website (with sandbox) launches soon!
Open source initiatives thrive when community members share code and in-kind resources. A major resource useful to growing the Editoria community will be shared contacts. If you like what you see, tell your friends and colleagues. If you have a newsletter or blog or other platform or channel, please consider featuring Editoria’s founding adopter perspectives, or early adopter use cases. Interesting content, and plenty of it!
There you go! Many resources to begin engaging with our community. Choose your level of involvement and go for it! I’d be delighted to hear from you!
We are delighted to welcome Alison McGonagle-O’Connell to the Editoria team as the new Editoria Community Manager. Alison has a long history in the publishing and technology industries, having held positions at Wiley, EBSCO, and Aries Systems. Most recently Alison was Global Product & Partner Marketing Manager at Aries, but Alison also spent a good amount of time as a production editor, so she is certainly no stranger to production workflows!
In this new role, Alison will be working closely with the Coko team—who have been helping us build Editoria—and will be managing the publisher, developer, and service provider communities for Editoria. Alison will play a key role in the evolution of Editoria, and will be driving and encouraging adoption and interfacing with members of the Editoria community. Catherine Mitchell (CDL), the Coko team, and I look forward to working closely with Alison. She will often be tweeting updates as @editoriapub. Follow us on Twitter to find out what’s happening with Editoria, and look for a email news (and a redesigned Editoria website) in the coming weeks. Please join us in welcoming Alison to the Editoria team!
If you would like to view a Editoria demo without installing the software we have prepared a slide deck for you. The slides contain screenshots and videos of the latest Editoria some notes attached. Link provided below! (view fullscreen for best effect).
These last 2 weeks Coko developers Yannis Barlas and Christos Kokosias have been working alongside Kate Warne and Cindy Fulton from UCP.
Yannis and Christos came to San Francisco (from Athens) for 3 weeks specifically to work with Kate and Cindy on some new features. Out of these meetings we now have some exciting new features that we will write more about on this blog soon!
While in San Francisco Christos and Yannis also met with the wider UCP staff to demonstrate Editoria and discuss the future of the application.
There was a lot of excitement about the application and a fantastic discussion about possible future features.
Cokos talented Julien Taquet has been busy designing a new look and feel for the Book Builder component in Editoria. We welcome your comments! Help us improve the look and feel of Editoria by adding you comments here. Mocks follow (you can download them as PDF from the same place you can comment).
Recent changes to Editoria.
