At Coko we build open source tools for scholarly publishing… sort of… that’s the tagline, but actually, there is a lot more to it. We have built open source technologies for publishers, it is true, but we have been careful to build frameworks which can be moulded to meet a large variety of use cases.
To understand what we actually do, it is worthwhile to look not just at the technology but at how we produce the technology. Essentially, we facilitate publishing staff through a process where they design their own platform… which is awesome in itself …but, actually, that’s not quite it either. What they are actually doing is designing their own workflow, one that gets rid of the current pains and opens up new possibilities. When we do that, we are essentially working as consultative workflow engineers – helping the publishing teams work out what an ideal workflow is for them, and then working out the technology/cultural change mix that must occur to get them there.
I’m very proud of how we work. We don’t create ‘black boxes’ and throw them at a publisher and say, there yo go! Use that! Rather we help them design what they want and build it (using our flexible frameworks and bringing in existing open source software, where possible).
It also allows us, as Karien Bezuidenhout (Shuttleworth Foundation) has said, to ‘bake cultural change into the product development process’. Very true.