It seems there's been quite a bit of talk about collaboration/review in science and academia as of late. Makes sense, as there are some real unsolved problems here.
Shameless plug: I'm also working on tackling peer review, but from a bit of a different angle. Penflip.com (https://www.penflip.com/) is like GitHub for non-programmers. It hosts public and private writing projects backed by git repos, but the interface is stripped down and simplified. Command line access is unnecessary (though still possible) thanks to an in-browser writing interface.
While still relatively early in development, I think Penflip has big potential in academia and science. If anybody here is interested in this space, I would love to hear your thoughts on my project.
You say Penflip is for non-programmers, but your project page says stuff like:
* Markdown support
* Built on Git
and non-programmers have no idea what these are and why they should care. You should probably do some user testing with non-programmers to figure out what claims are relevant on your front page.
EDIT: pricing is confusing as well.
It says "Plans can be paid monthly or annually.", but the paying plans mention that they have to be "(paid annually)" which does not make sense. Can you clarify ? So can you actually pay per month or do you have to pay per year ?
Additionally, what is the license for public projects ? GitHub makes it clear that they have to be open-source. How about on Penflip ? Can they be open, while retain a copyright license ?
Also, why don't you have some intermediate plans ? Imagine I'm writing a book, having the 8 dollars plan for 50 projects seems completely overkill, I'd probably want a plan in there with 2 to 5 project or something like that. 50 seems like a company/organization plan.
And it's not clear what "premium support" means in the pricing, nor why we should care about it.
This being said, it's a good project, but I see many ways you could improve on how you communicate around it.
I second this. I found out about Penflip earlier today and was interested in using it for my fiction writing hobbies. But the 50 repos plan is an overkill for me. I would also like to see some smaller plans, maybe for 10 repos?
Why does the pdf for the example YC application (despite having a lot of text)[^1] only say:
Congratulations, you’ve successfully created a SparkleShare repository!
Any files you add or change in this folder will be automatically synced to
ssh://git@penflip.com/loren/yc-application and everyone connected to it.
SparkleShare is an Open Source software program that helps people
collaborate and share files. If you like what we do, consider buying us a
beer: http://www.sparkleshare.org/
Have fun! :)
It seems like you should give a nod to Prof. MacFarlane if you are going to rely so heavily on his project. Do you support all of the features of pandoc's extended markdown format?
> It seems like you should give a nod to Prof. MacFarlane if you are going to rely so heavily on his project.
Good call. How is this typically done? As with any modern app, I'm utilizing countless open source projects. What's the protocol here?
> Do you support all of the features of pandoc's extended markdown format?
I'm using github flavored markdown + footnotes + raw_tex, some custom latex templates, a looooooot of hacking to make various bits and pieces play nicely. My conversion script is 300 lines long, I'm not just handing a file off to pandoc. Needless to say, pandoc is still invaluable here.
Shameless plug: I'm also working on tackling peer review, but from a bit of a different angle. Penflip.com (https://www.penflip.com/) is like GitHub for non-programmers. It hosts public and private writing projects backed by git repos, but the interface is stripped down and simplified. Command line access is unnecessary (though still possible) thanks to an in-browser writing interface.
While still relatively early in development, I think Penflip has big potential in academia and science. If anybody here is interested in this space, I would love to hear your thoughts on my project.