Tutorial: Managing a project

Best practices

Before you start adding content to your project, consider how you and your collaborators would like to proceed. Issues to consider at the outset include:

  • Attribution. How would you like to apportion credit for the work to be undertaken? Ideally, the project description would include a list of project participants alongside the sections they worked on. For more fine-grained attributions, you might consider adding a “Project Log” as one of your annotation types so that users can see which contributor was responsible for which section.
  • Disagreement. How will you handle scholarly disagreement? If there is a difference of opinion over a particular translation, will you incorporate the disagreement into the translation itself? The annotation layer of an annotated translation? If the disagreement is substantial and wide-ranging, you might consider creating one annotation layer for “Person X’s Translation” and another for “Person Y’s Translation.” 
  • Formatting. How would you like to see your content formatted? Would you prefer to define your text divisions as pian, juan, or “chapters”? Would you like to number and label individual pages?
  • Communication. How would you like to communicate with other project members? The project forum? E-mail? Skype or some other chat service? 
  • Guidelines for participation. Especially in the case of projects with many participants, many of whom you might not know personally, you might consider adding an official list of “Project Guidelines” to the main project page. What would it take for a user’s membership in the project to be revoked.

Please note that any disagreements within projects are to be adjudicated on the project level, with the project editor as the final arbiter. The Ten Thousand Rooms Project administrators will not intervene in the management of projects except in cases where a project violates the Terms of Use.

Managing project membership

There are a number of ways to manage the the list of project members.

  • To add new contributors, there are two methods:
    • Click on the “Group” tab from your project home page, then click “Add People.” In the “User Name” field, type the name of the registered user you’d like to add, then select the correct name from the pop-up list. (If the desired name does not appear, you will have contact the user directly for the user name they are using.) Finally, click “Add Users” at the bottom of the page.
    • Go to your main project page and scroll down to the bottom, where you will find a shareable link that you can send to other users. After registering for the site, a user need only click the link to become a “Pending” project participant. To turn a user into an “Active” participant, the project editor needs to access the “Group” tab from the project home page, then click “People.” Find the relevant user and click “edit” next to their name. In the “Edit Membership window,” find the box labeled “Status,” change the setting from “Pending” to “Active,” and then click “Update Membership” at the bottom of the page to save changes.
  • To see a list of project participants, click the “Members” tab from your main project page.
  • To edit a project member’s access privileges, select “People” under the “Group” tab from the main project page. Scroll down and click “edit” next to the user whose privileges you wish to edit.
    • To accept a user who has requested membership, change the “Status” field from “Pending” to “Active.”
    • To assign someone else the role of project editor, check the “project editor” box under “Roles.”
    • When you are finished, be sure to click “Update Membership.”
  • To remove a user from your project, click “remove.”

Using the project forum

One of the best ways to communicate with other project members is via the forum, which is only viewable by project members. The project forum is a good place to pose questions to other members and resolve any disagreements. To access the forum, click the “Forum” tab from the main project page.

  • To start a new discussion thread, click the “New Topic” button.
  • To reply to an existing post, click the thread in question and then type your response in the field at the bottom of the page. When you are finished, you can click “Save.”
  • To edit one of your posts, click the “edit” button.