About GDG Wisdom?

What is GDG Wisdom?

GDG Wisdom is an initiative to collect, organize and share useful knowledge (best practices, tips, resources and references) for creating, organizing and growing the Google Developer Groups community. All content here is created and owned by the Google Developers Group Community and open to the whole world under Creative Commons licence (note: the exact CC license is yet to be determined).

What is its history?

GDG Wisdom was started by Daniel Franc and a group of GDG organizers at Google I/O in 2013. The intent was to develop a knowledge repository implemented as a static website that was maintained by a small core group of Wisdom Keepers. Contributors provided 'wisdom' through social media updates (e.g., G+) that were tagged to bring them to keepers' attention. Wisdom keepers then curated and converted that content into website updates. The approach placed an increasing burden on the wisdom keepers in maintaining relevance and attribution, and also denied contributors the instant satisfaction of seeing their updates in print.

At Google I/O 2014, Dan kicked off a conversation on revising the approach to address these challenges. A new group of Wisdom Keepers joined the effort and the decision was made to use GitHub as the content repository, under the management of a new GDG Wisdom Organization. This would allow anyone to contribute content by simply forking the relevant repository and sending us a pull request. It also allowed contributors to be directly identified in the GitHub dashboard for the project. Most importantly, it gave the curators (wisdom keepers) a better way to track relevance, and reduced effort in maintaining an merging updates.

In February 2015, Adriana Cerundulo took over the GDG Wisdom oversight after Dan Franc stepped away. She held a hangout to revisit the state of GDG Wisdom and set goals for its progress. During that conversation, a unanimous decision was made to use the GitBook content authoring and publishing platform to create the next revision of GDG Wisdom.

At the pre-Google I/O GDG Global Summit in 2015, Nitya Narasimhan presented the status report on GDG Wisdom to an audience of over 450 global GDG organizers, and held a "garage" session to get people familiar with GitBook. A decision was made to target a simple edition of the Wisdom GitBook for July 2015.

How does GitBook work?

GitBook provides both online editing tools and automated publishing of that content in four formats (web, PDF, ePub and mobi) making the content accessible across platforms. In addition, it provides integrated search and sharing (with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and G+) on a per-page basis, making it uniquely suitable for soliciting and advertising content requests and responses.

GitBook allows authors to write their manuscripts in Markdown, and automatically generates both a responsive web page and multiple e-book formats (PDF, mobi, ePub) for convenient distribution and consumption of that content. GitBook content is backed by a GitHub repository, with webhooks that automatically trigger a rebuild of the book every time the associated GitHub repository is updated.

Who are the Wisdom Keepers?

GDG Wisdom is overseen by members of the GDG Task Force community who have direct commit rights to the GitHub project.