Contribution pathway

[baileythegreen]

Identify workable contribution pathways to allow community members to design and submit materials, which will undergo a review process before being published.

[baileythegreen]

A system of GitHub pull requests allows for review and blocking of people who violate the code of conduct. However, not everyone is comfortable with git.

[baileythegreen]

As mentioned in Issue #6, this isn't possible through GitHub pages. Likely requires a server to host stuff. It may also be a good idea to restrict who can upload files in some way: in the unlikely event of a malicious attack, having file submission open could be a problem.

[thismatters]

I'm relatively certain you are talking about content contributions here, as any technical contributions will almost certainly be done via git.

I think you could manage content contributions with a hybrid process which is reachable through a static site on Github Pages and facilitated through free or nearly free services. Here is the outline:

• Static site has link to google form for content intake
• Google form captures relevant information from content creator along with any assets. Form data is stored in a spreadsheet, assets go into a google drive (or sequestered folder in dropbox) for review.
• A human pores over the content intake spreadsheet and performs manual review, updating the spreadsheet with review status
• A python script is run (either manually or as a cronjob somewhere) which enacts the review status by deleting any assets for rejected content, or by migrating accepted content to dropbox and inserting the appropriate entry into the content index and pushing into its own branch
• A human merges branch after review

[baileythegreen]

I did mean content contributions. As discussed previously, I'd been kind of operating under the assumption people with the technical know-how to help with that side didn't really overlap with the target audience.

The only potential issue I see at the moment with the outlined plan is that I don't know how to get a Python (or other type of) script to access a Google spreadhseet. There's a potential conflict there between having something that can be operated on programmatically and having something collaborative and online.

[thismatters]

Interacting with a google sheet with python isn't exactly basic, but it is well documented and very doable! There is definitely potential for conflict, but as long as human fields and machine fields are well marked then I would hope that the human reviewer could be trusted.