Actually I have no secret requirements. I was thinking about setting up a project for open source school books.

The problem is, in such a situation, it is not everybody who has the expertise to contribute, there should be a select few who should be tasked with the final decision. Even among the experts there are disagreements. 

So I was hoping to have a way of defining a project head, a select few who have privileged whose expertise and identity can be confirmed, then everybody else. this provides the fine grained control necessary [my opinion] to produce a good quality, credible text book.

The reason I need a select few to be able to create books is because I envision, first creating a draft guideline dictating what chapters and content will be included in the book and what format it will follow.

 After that has been finalized and agreed upon, then the main text boob can be created and people can contribute being restricted/guided by the already established guideline. So each text book shall have a guideline, and no text book can be created without a finalized guideline.

I believe this conditions are necessary for producing high quality open source text books.

Hello Adam.

Some background.

I come from Kenya. Educated in both primary and post primary education in kenya. One of the biggest problems I witnessed is the lack of current peer reviewed texts in those two levels (I do not know about university level since I went abroad for that).

In my higher level education I came across many people who like me went through the same frustrations. This are very highly educated people who are willing to give back to society. Problem is, I am a strong believer of enabling, rather than assisting.

So it dawned on me, that if there was a platform, for these highly educated people who are willing to give back, that enabled them to codify their knowledge, in a well organized manner (text books), then those texts can be availed at little to no cost to the population in Kenya.

It then occurred to me that if the books were organized in years, meaning we group knowledge in terms of what a child should know at every year of their school life, then those books would be relevant all over the world, not just in kenya.

For example, if we were to break it down in two year intervals, and agree that in the first two years of a child's education they should know a,b,c, and d of subject 1. Then we should be able to publish a book about subject 1, that covers topics a, b, c and d. and any school in the world would be able to use that book.

Breaking books in years also means that the cost of buying new books every term/semester is minimized and more students can afford to go to school.

This is the general idea that I would like to able to implement.

Adam

Thank you I will contact you.

At the moment no but it is a very much needed feature.

You can invite users with different roles. If you setup your instance you can also define different roles yourself - very fine grained -  in the administration control center. We have to ways of inviting people - by mail or with an invite code. Important to know for you - the invitation is only possble bookwise but NOT chapterwise. You can define the status for chapters in the book settings, this could be also a name of a person to assign it to them.