I don't understand GitHub! Help!

[rmcminds]

GitHub might not be the best platform for a group like this, but I figured we could try it for a couple of reasons.

Presumably, participants in the group will be scientists, and learning GitHub and version control in general will be extremely useful for all of us. I'm familiar with it, so it seemed like a comfortable way to create a pseudo-'wiki' for interactive collaboration on text. The most obvious alternative that occurs to me is a shared Google folder, where people could collaborate on Google Docs together. But In my experience, those shared folders get very messy very quickly. I've also experienced the annoying catastrophic deletion of many files by an inexperienced user or a former collaborator who was trying to clean up after leaving a project. An explicit version control framework that requires a vote of approval before a change can be made might help address this. Git's version control also comes in handy when you want to compare changes - you can easily look at just the most recent changes, or the cumulative changes since the first document version, or whatever.

I also envision a nice baseline where, maybe far in the future, the hosting of documents here will make them available if we want to start using them for other things - like pulling the text into a blog or something.

However, I understand that there is a steep learning curve for collaboration on GitHub. Feel free to ask any questions in this Discussion!