Pull requests
Work in progress
While there will be many types of contributions, arguably the focal and most common one will be editing of the root book.
This will happen through the standard git issue-fork-pull request-merge process which we will not discuss further here, as it is well documented in many places online. As such, several central sources of credit and contribution will be related to this process and they are worth discussing in a bit greater detail here.
In writing this book, we aim to create a new vision for the future of technology that can help inspire a community to pursue and help create it. We do not aim primarily at a statement of fact or consensus, though we hope to help surface facts and promote cooperation across difference. As such, we will strive to mostly maintain a coherent argument and authorial voice, rather than combining together separate contributions from distinct authors. However, we believe such a goal is consistent with a wide range of participation and input and that, ultimately, our ideas will only succeed if they eventually become a reflection of common sense of a community that pursues them. As such we hope that the community helping us build this book will contribute a range of edits from the small (e.g. copyedits) to the large (e.g. building blocks of text that help us flesh out an application or restate a principle). The more significant these contributions, the greater they will be recognized. We also seek to embrace technological advancements in all our work and thus welcome the use of a range of digital assistive tools, such as generative foundation models, in creating contributions.
At the same time, we expect there to be far more engagement than any small group of maintainers can realistically manage in any project on these terms, especially one as ours that has natural adversaries. Thus the editorial and maintenance role will be at least as important for us to share with the community as the contribution role. We plan to do this by asking the community to help prioritize issues and PRs and to reward accurate prioritization, ones that end up being accepted/acted upon. The precise mechanisms we will use for this will evolve over time and we will shortly link to live explanatory documents. However, we will always endeavor to use creative approaches grounded in the principles described in the book, for example using a mixture of prediction markets and various forms of plural voting.