This page explains how you can be involved in using EtherPad to make collaborative notes (at a conference or meeting etc.). The background is at the end. Hopefully if you intend to take notes using EtherPad, you can use this advice to learn how to collaborate sensibly.

If you've got any suggestions for improving this advice - e-mail it to [mailto:tom@tommorris.org tom@tommorris.org]

Ground rules

  1. Observe netiquette (and, if you are co-present in real life, etiquette). Don't be a douchebag. Try to make sure that everything you contribute adds to, rather than detracts from, the experience of both your collaborators and others in the future reading the document.
  2. If you collaborate on the document, add your name to the contributors section and set your nickname in EtherPad appropriately.
  3. By participating, you agree that your text is going into the public domain or will be licensed with a broadly copyleft license like the GNU Free Documentation License or Creative Commons. Before you start, be sure to specify at the bottom of the document what license it is released under. If you are unhappy with the license, do not participate.

Pick a role

When collaborating on note taking, there are a variety of things you can do:

  1. Note taking: try and get an honest and roughly accurate version of what is being said.
  2. Correcting mistakes: observe what the note takers are writing and clean up spelling or grammar mistakes.
  3. Metadata lookup: if the speaker mentions something that's new, interesting or not blindingly obvious, go and find it. Find webpages about it and include them in the 'references' section of the document.
  4. Commenters: feel free to add useful comments. Make them short, sweet and be sure not to interrupt the flow of others. Enclose them in square brackets and be sure to sign them with your nickname or real name, in a broadly similar way to how you would on a wiki talk page.
    • If a comment looks like it might spark a lot of discussion, create a separate section at the bottom of the document where the thread can play out, or an off-channel place for discussion.
    • Useful comments include: fact checking, pointing to existing work that is going on elsewhere, describing audience reaction.
  5. Conversation trackers: grab transcripts of what is being said on Twitter, IRC or other real-time discussion areas. For Twitter, be sure to get the URIs of the posts and include them.

Templates

Examples

Background

In 2002-2004, back when we talked about "weblogs" and "social software" rather than "lifestreams" and "social media", at nerdy conferences, there was a very useful tool called Hydra. It later became known as SubEthaEdit. It's still available: from codingmonkeys.de. Only then, it was free for personal use. Where as now, it costs money. People would make really good notes collaboratively and then post them somewhere, and everyone could link there. Instead, now, we don't do that - we just occasionally make very bad notes in sessions and post them on blogs. The collaboration was a very good thing: it keeps you in a state of focus, but other people can just jump in at any point.

To see what Hydra/SubEthaEdit was like back in the day, read:

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