Collaboration

Introduction

Bibledit allows several users to work on one Bible at the same time.

Collaboration can happen through the network, or a USB stick.

Under the hood, Bibledit uses Git for collaboration. Git is a content manager. The user does not notice that Git is used, neither does he operate it. Bibledit does it all for him. The person that sets up the collaboration, though, will have to use a few Git commands once. Once everything is set up, it all goes automatic.

Bibledit stores all data locally, but when collaboration is enabled, it connects to a central repository. The repository will be on the network, or on the USB stick. The data is shared through that repository.

Network

If several users work together on one project using the network, then if somebody makes a change in the text of the Bible, within a short time that change will be propagated to the other users. They will see that change on their screens too.

First of all somebody knowledgeable with computers and networks needs to set up the collaboration.

After that it will go all smoothly.

USB stick

If several users work together on one project using a USB stick, then the changes need to be physically carried from one user's computer to the one of the other user. If a stick is inserted into a computer, and everything has been set up properly, then the data is moved to and from the USB stick automatically. Normally one user will work on the data for a while, then insert the USB stick and have the stick be updated automatically. Then the stick will be carried to the other user. He will insert the stick too, and then his data will be updated using the data on the stick, and he will also on his turn update the data on the stick. So the stick can then be moved to the first user, and so on. By keeping on moving the stick between the computers, all data will be updated, and all changes will get propagated to all users. All the users will see the changes on their screens.

To start off with this, somebody knowledgeable with computers needs to set up the collaboration.

After that all will goo smoothly.

Collaborating

Now we come to the purpose of everything, which is working together on one project.

This collaboration is very simple: Just work on your data as you did before.

Bibledit cares for everything, and everything will be updated and shared automatically.

On rare occasions you might notice a dialog when Bibledit says that it has reloaded the project because of the changes made by other users. This might happen if the change is in the chapter you are now editing. But this is really all that is visible, the rest is done automatically. And of course, you notice changes in your data that you didn't put in yourself. Others did that.

Notes

Use dialog View / Git tasks to see what the collaboration system actually does. Most of the times there should be no pending tasks anyway, because tasks will get done immediately. On a slow network you might see some tasks pending. Or if you happen to be offline, tasks will accumulate till such time that you get online again.

For worldwide collaboration, a server can be set up on the internet, and used by all parties. Instead of entering git://192.168.0.6/repository or git://localhost/repository as the repository, for example, it will be something like git://repo.mydomain.org/repository.

The collaboration system can conveniently be used for automatic backup. The system that uses the USB stick for collaboration works well for that. The USB stick can be carried around.

Collaboration of two projects on the same computer is possible if those projects have the same ancestor, that is, one is created by importing all the Biblebooks exported of the other one. This can be helpful for demo purposes and to test and learn to use this tool if only one computer is available.