Opening up our book writing process

As Christian and I start to get deeper into our book, we have discussed between ourselves and our editor, the idea of opening the process up to those interested in Social Patterns.

We have created a wiki at designingsocialinterfaces.com and are starting to post the patterns we are writing as we work through the chapters. Each pattern is open for folks to modify / give feedback – we just ask that you do amendments rather than deleting things wholesale – as we get stared. Additionally the MediaWiki software has a Talk tab for a discussion per pattern/page so feel free to leave a comment there if you don’t want to actually modify the pattern.

We are looking for feedback, alternative cases, challenges to what we are seeing and documenting or additions if you think we haven’t quite got it all there yet.

The wiki is locked to registered and email validated users only – just create a username and password, then go to your preferences and add an email addresss. The system will send you an email. Click on the embedded link and you are gold. I know it’s a pain, but with wikis so open to spam, we felt we needed to go in with some safeguards against the blatent spam that we would get.

I have started to post patterns from the chapter: You’re Invited—which encompasses Sign Up, Sign In, the Password Antipattern, Welcome Area and other getting signed up and started patterns. So far only three patterns are posted but more will be coming throughout the process.

We hope you will join us on this adventure and we think the material will be better with the community feedback.

erin
current: experience matters design :: senior level interaction design and systems strategy consulting former partner, tangible user experience; Yahoo! founder of the public and internal Yahoo! pattern library. design director of ued teams responsible for designing solutions across key yahoo! platforms: social media, personalization, membership and vertical search.

2 Comments

  1. I was really interested to see your project with Christian to develop “Designing Social Interfaces” via Wiki software.
    Visiting it couple weeks apart… it doesn’t seem like much is happening yet.
    Got an ETA for when you’ll be going full-speed on that?
    [ Not sure how much I’ll have to contribute, but we’ll see after I get a peek at the process. ]
    “Break a leg!” —CQ

  2. CalmQuiet – you have to keep checking back. We are writing the book now. And as we are writing – or as we finish chapters we are posting patterns to the Wiki. We wanted folks to see the strawman outline to get a sense of what we intend to cover. Since this post, I have published several reputation patterns. I have the whole identity chapter in a first draft as well but am tweaking it before I post the patterns.

    This is definitely a check back often situation. Or subscribe to the RSS feed of RecentChanges to see what’s happening.

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