Reviewing documents

Creating a review team

Adding people to your area of the Global Collaborative is a three-step process.

1. Ask them to join the Global Collaborative using the on-line form.
   http://www.globalcollab.org/join_form
   
2. Ask them to send you their log-in name when they have joined.
3. Use the [Sharing] tab to make them a 'reviewer' for your area.
   

Once you have done this, they will be able to log in and see your private documents and make comments on them.  I suggest that you send them the brief guide to using the GC (the MS Word document "Global Collaborative basics"), so that they know the basics of how things work.

Reviewing Private documents

Here is one idea for how to manage the review process for Private documents.  This will work well before you launch, I think.

1. Turn on comments for your Private documents.
2. Have them comment on the documents.
3. Incorporate those comments into each document.
4. Delete the comments once the documents have been finalised.
5. Turn off comments for the documents once they have been finalised.
6. Publish your documents.

This means that your reviewers can comment on the documents before they are Published.  Once they are Published, no one will be able to comment on them.

Please keep in mind that this is a lot of extra work if your reviewers are only going to say things like "This looks good to me."  However, if they want to give detailed feedback, this will work very well.

Reviewing Published documents

Once you documents are Published, comments are either turned on or turned off.  If they are turned on, anyone can comment.  If they are turned off, no-one can comment.

If you don't want to have comments turned on, remember that you can always invite feedback by e-mail.  A line at the bottom that says:

	Please send feedback to example@example.com

is a nice way to invite people to tell you what they think.  In my opinion, you will get a lot less comments, but the ones that you do get will be a lot more valuable.

A formal approval process

In some cases, you may actually want to control the publication of the document, rather than just collect comments.  This can be done using the [State] of an item.  All documents start as Private. They can then move through various states, such as Submit and Reject on their way to being Published.

Once they are Published, someone can Retract or Reject them. I don't recommend this, though, as it can break links coming into the Global Collaborative and confuse outside visitors ("It was there yesterday!").

This means that you can have a different people build the pages to the people that approve the pages. Most people find that Private and Published are all that they need.  But the other possibilities are there for you if you want to use a formal approval process.

Jonathan O'Donnell
4 October 2007