Tentative steps

So, the first part of the Open Words community is now open. I've just created a phpBB forum which can be found over at congelical.com/forum. Feel free to register there and start discussing whatever you want (including the main Open Words site and ideas for the forum). The forum is intended as a place for discussion of whatever goes on on the site, as well as discussion on writing in general. It also gives users a chance to get to know each other slightly better outside of just what they do on the main site. Currently I need to work on how to link the main site and the forum together (such as how to link users' accounts on each).

Any feedback can either be left here as usual or on the forums.

A hell of a lot of reading

Recently I've been working on the literature review segment of the project. This is basically background reading on various things that relate to what I'm doing. This has ranged from looking at other sites involved with online publishing or collaboration to reading up things like social software and how it works. It's currently a work in progress and can be found in two Google documents. The first contains anything I've taken from articles and papers I've read (and one video I've watched). The second contains my observations of various sites. They're both full of links, so further information can be found. They'll eventually be turned into full pieces of writing, like my piece on moderation systems (which is also part of this review, though was originally done separately). As usual, comments are welcome.

In other news, I've been thinking about site documentation. I've decided it could work well in wiki form. This could also work for things like the writing advice pages. I'm going to look into how this could be set up and think about how access could be controlled (such as only allowing users with a certain level of participation in the site wiki access). Let me know what you think and whether the wiki should be public, semi-public or private.