On this site, you’ve got the option of subscribing to first drafts, as well as final drafts (RSS links).
The email subscription option defaults to final pieces only - tick the ‘1st draft’ box you want in on everything.
Why on Earth would I be giving you the option to read 1st drafts? Isn’t life short enough already?
- I’m using “1st draft” here to mean: the start of an idea or topic, in a post that I’ll continue to edit, ramble in, add links and connected thoughts, keeping it all in one place and regularly pushing to github.
- In “1st drafts” I’ll try and lay out what I think the questions are and get some first points down. These may just be snippets that never go anywhere or they may grow. Though it absolutely will include shitty first drafts along the way, the point is to get stuff out there, experiment with it and let it grow.
- This is also part of having more control and ownership as well as using a structure that leaves an accountability trail by being as open as possible. Everything here is on my own machine as well as stored on Github (admittedly, owned by Microsoft). If anyone so desires - why would you, that’d be mad, but if you wanted to- you could look at the history of any file (here’s this one’s) and see what’s changed (e.g. a recent commit difference). You could even sign up to github and add comments.1
What I like about github is all those things I mentioned above - openness, visibility, accountability, ownership. (Shhh about Microsoft, shhhh.) But in these systems, one can also see ways to make knowledge in a distributed way, in a place where there’s enough of a level of control to balance collaboration and safety. I can warm my bones late at night imagining that, in some tiny way, I’m contributing to a better world for words.
It’s possible. Places already exist where this has worked. Wikipedia is straight-up brilliant (entirely unsurprising people like Musk should attack it), well-designed tech channelling collaboration into incremental improvements while keeping the idiots at bay.
Also - why write when you can instead spend far too long setting up complex writing systems? The Douglas Adams principle of programming:
“I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.”
Footnotes
Not quite as ridiculous as it sounds - github is one of the few collab platforms I’ve found that works across both universities and UK public bodies, where often many websites are blocked (I presume because it’s Microsoft owned).↩︎