Talk at Data Commons Project retreat, June 18, 2011. How do tools+culture of free and open source software development translate across to collaborative data projects?

2. Revision control

3. Distributed revision control

5. Diff and patch?

6. Revision control?

8. Diff (1970s): generate a summary of differences between two text files

10. Clear file format

15. When happy with a modification, “commit” it a shared repository, with a log message

16. When want changes others have made, “update” from shared repository

17. Assumes: permission management (e.g. who's allowed to change what)

19. Too big a gap between people who are “in” and people who are “out”

20. Distributed revision control fixes that.

23. BSD : do what you like with my stuff, including being a selfish jerk

24. …

25. Bottom line: it is very clear what you can do with free software, now, and into the future

32. No generic revision control tool

33. Too much fragmentation, loose collaboration is too expensive

34. diffkit, coopy

37. Anything unspecified should remain unchanged

39. A github for data? Private data subsidizes public?

41. http://ckan.net/

42. http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/