Tim O’Reilly and Heather Joseph join Coko Board

Very happy that Tim O’Reilly is joining our advisory board! A few weeks ago I asked Tim if he would join and he was very gracious to accept. We are very lucky to have him onboard.

“Many of the challenges of decentralized authority – challenges that are stumping the great tech platforms of today – have been solved by scientific scholarship. But traditional science publishing moves too slowly to keep up with today’s hyper-networked world. Using open source technologies to turbocharge the decentralized search for truth is a grand opportunity, and I’m glad to be a part of it.” —Tim O’Reilly

Heather Joseph is also joining!

“Coko is committed to creating a truly open research environment by integrating openness into all of its foundational elements —from technology, to operating standards to governance.  Openness is an essential component of their entire operation, and not an afterthought applied only to outputs. It’s a vision that can have a profound impact on the communications of scholarship, and I’m pleased to help play a supporting role.” —Heather Joseph

… more information here:

https://coko.foundation/heather-joseph-tim-oreilly-join-coko-advisory-board/

Workflow Sprints

Some years ago I came up with a methodology called Book Sprints. It is a facilitated process that takes a group of people to collaborate on producing a book in 5 days. Zero to book in 5 days as we say.

There has much I have learned from this methodology which can be re-purposed. After 10 years working with Book Sprints (10th anniversary this year!) I now know a lot more about why it works and what kind of situations would fit this kind of process. For example, facilitated methods like this don’t work when there is just one person that has the knowledge that is needed in a book. For help with this one author approach, you need either a coach or a ghostwriter. Ironically, when I started Book Sprints I was in exactly this situation…I couldn’t Book Sprint about Book Sprints because I was the only one doing them.

But when you get two or more people …it starts to get interesting…. this is because Book Sprints are very good at developing a shared mental model of the problem very fast. The more minds with the right domain knowledge that come at this together, the better the result… with a few caveats… For example, it seems a natural limit for the number of minds to share the process is about 15 max. That’s because too many minds go too far too fast and you might end up with quite a lot of fragmentation. However, if you have the right people, the right methodology, and (most importantly) an experienced facilitator that knows how to wield the methodology – then magic can happen.

Anyway… I am now applying myself to taking these lessons and developing a new methodology, working title ‘Workflow Sprints’….what is it? Well… I have seen similar problems with the speed of production for books in the software world… The problem is – how do you redesign a (much) better workflow, and then design a platform to meet those needs quickly? What I see happening is that organisations will employ someone external, or re-deploy internal staff, to do a workflow audit, interviewing all parties, create a report with flow diagrams, and then use this as a basis for the developers to imagine a better way of doing things. It is a very linear and disconnected process, and it takes a very long time.

I believe that I can facilitate a group to do this in 2 days. In fact, I’ve already done it. Recently I went to EBI (Europe PMC folks) to do a workshop on their workflow. In a day we had redesigned it and had mocks ready to go. I was curious to see how much this remained true over time, and it appears that they are sticking to this design. They will fill it out, to be sure, but they had the starting point in a day.

It’s not the first time I’ve facilitated workflow development in a couple of days; there have been a lot of workshops I facilitated with various publishing entities on the way, but this was the first time I felt confident enough to go in boots and all. Now that I see how the process  can work ,I’m going to try and make this a thing. I have thought about the workflow I want in order for this to happen, and I’ll be trying it as a full-blown method and workflow in the next few months with an org or two. The aim is to produce a summary of the current workflow (this takes a long time if using a legacy ‘interview’ process and much nuance is missed and I’m confident we can get a better result), a summary of the optimised / improved workflow, and wireframes of the new platform. All in 2 days. Which also means I can make this very cost-effective, a whole lot faster than legacy processes, with better results and internal buy-in since it’s the internal staff that design the new workflow and platform for themselves.

It is quite an efficiency. I’m hoping it will be something publishers can consider doing in the early phase of deciding whether they want to migrate to better workflows.

Quite possibly, you think this is a big call. But I’ve done this before. When I started Book Sprints I didn’t come across anyone that thought it was possible… this feels very similar.

I think it is going to work very well. There will always be challenges as you can’t anticipate how all the variables at play will come together on the day. But I have been there before with Book Sprints, and I’m pretty confident in my facilitation skills… So here goes….

Once I’ve proven this out with a few orgs I think this could prove to be extremely beneficial to any publishing org that is pondering how they can improve their workflow – with or without new technology. It could be useful for any org, for that matter. Interesting days.

Some photos below of some of the orgs I worked with to help define this process…

Wormbase

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ArXiv

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Collabra

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Erudit

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UCP

Kate and Cindy (UCP production staff) designing their system (Editoria)
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EBI /EPMC

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Interesting Web Based XML Editor

Looks pretty comprehensive and interesting for XML QA:
https://lastlog.de/blog/posts/xmlmirror.html

I met with one of the developers in Berlin yesterday (Joachim)…nice chap. Will look into this editor in more detail. One thing for sure, it illustrates the difficulty of editing and validating XML docs in the browser – there are so many structural and syntax issues to anticipate.

Caffeine Daze

Some pics of my traveln coffee gettup. The first pics are of an espresso pump I was given for my birthday. It makes great espresso. You need a water boiler of some kind…great for camping as you can boil the water with gas etc… I’m taking this back to NZ to leave in my truck so I can have espresso after surfn!

First you need some good local coffee…

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Then break out this baby… the only issue with this machine is that I have been stopped several times by security at airports because they don’t know what it is…

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Break the top open and fill the cap inside with coffee…

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Then unscrew the bottom cup and fill it with hot water…

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Screw the water cup back on and then manually pump the water through the grounds…

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It makes really nice coffee… you can see there is a lovely creamy head on the espresso….mm.m..

Then there is this wonderful machine… a velox portable espresso machine (its actually more like a mocha). It is from Italy and is still available new today. I had one for a trip I did to Antarctica several years ago. Unfortunately that machine died after many years of heavy use and I just didn’t seem to manage to get a new one (I brought 2 over the years but both lost in delivery). However…just recently my assistant Anne found the one below for 28 euro! Secondhand in Berlin and in super good condition. This particular one is actually from the 70s and still in perfect condition.

This one is my preferred option for hotels and things. It is fast and the slightly longer/stronger coffee means its a perfect wake up call and I don’t have to go find some terrible hotel coffee…

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Essentially you unscrew the top and fill the chamber with water.

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Then fill the top cap with coffee grounds, put the top back on, plug it in and turn it on…

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It also makes amazing coffee…slightly stronger and longer than the hand pump but they are both awesome…

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