Use of GitHub as a Platform for Open Collaboration on Text Documents

Justin Longo Tanya M. Kelley

8/21/2015

Type
conference-proceedings
Region
Sector
Internet Governance
Category
Civic Technology, Collective Intelligence, Design Thinking, Distributed Governance, Institutional Innovation
Methodology
Case Studies, Qualitative Analysis, User Studies
Objective
Access, Effectiveness, Participation, Transparency
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Abstract

Recently, researchers are paying attention to the use of the software development and code-hosting web service GitHub for other collaborative purposes, including a class of activity referred to as document, text, or prose collaboration. These alternative uses of GitHub as a platform for sharing non-code artifacts represent an important modification in the practice of open collaboration. We survey cases where GitHub has been used to facilitate collaboration on non-code outputs, identify its strengths and weaknesses when used in this mode, and propose conditions for successful collaborations on co-created text documents.