What is Anthologize?
Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows you to turn WP content into an ebook. Anthologize provides a drag-and-drop interface for compiling projects, and an engine for exporting projects to ePub, PDF, RTF, HTML, or TEI.
Anthologize was originally developed in 2010, as part of the One Week | One Tool project. Sponsored by the NEH's Office for Digital Humanities, One Week | One Tool brought a dozen humanist-technologists to George Mason University's Center for History and New Media for a "digital humanities barn raising". The idea was to take the concept of the code sprint - which is a common prototyping technique in the technology world - and apply it to the normally risk-averse, slow-moving world of academia. In six days, the members of the OW|OT team came up with the idea for Anthologize, built the initial prototype, and built an outreach campaign around the software.
The Anthologize Conundrum
After the honeymoon, members of the Anthologize team - including me - went back to their regular jobs, and development on the plugin sputtered. Yet there continues to be interest in the tool, as evidenced by, for example, a recent Profhacker article on using Anthologize for creating a printable syllabus. So, while there's interest in using Anthologize, there has been little opportunity (read: money) for Anthologize developers to continue updating the software.
Paging potential patrons
In the last year, I've shaped more and more of my client work into what I've described as "patronage" relationships, where the client pays for specific pieces of development, with the understanding that these specific pieces will then be incorporated back into the free software ecosystem. This has worked great for general WordPress and BuddyPress projects - these platforms are widely known, and there are lots of fundable projects built on them.
Anthologize, on the other hand, hasn't worked out this way - in a sense, the underlying premise of Anthologize is that publishing models should be democratized, and so the target audience for the software is not in a position to pay large amounts for further development of the tool. So I'm going a different route. Instead of waiting for independent, well-funded projects with specific dev requirements, I'm asking for people with a general interest in furthering Anthologize to devote fairly small amounts of money toward non-specific upkeep.
How this will work
Essentially, I'm hoping that, through this campaign, I'll be able to piece together a crowdsourced "client". Money earned here (along with the CHNM match) will be used to purchase an appropriate number of hours of my development time, which I will put toward general Anthologize development - fixing bugs, making the software more stable and up-to-date with WordPress, and adding new features. I'll be using the rate of $75/hr to translate the campaign pledges into development time. This is a deep discount on my normal consulting rate, which is 3-4x more.
I've set the goal for the campaign at $2,500, which I think is a reasonable goal for some meaty work. Remember, though, that CHNM is matching up to 5K in pledges - so don't be afraid to pledge more.
If response is high, and I raise far more money than expected (thereby purchasing more hours than I have readily available), I'll leave open the possibility of hiring some of the other members of the Anthologize team to do further development.
Development will begin in November 2012, and will likely go through December (perhaps further, if there's lots of demand). After every 10 hours of development, or at every release (whichever is comes first), I'll write a blog post at teleogistic.net summarizing work to date. You can also follow along with Anthologize development on Github.
Why?
I'm launching this campaign for two main reasons:
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Anthologize is cool - The plugin has a lot of potential, in the academy and beyond. I hate for that potential to go unfulfilled because of some irksome bugs.
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To vindicate One Week | One Tool - One of the underlying (if unspoken) ideas behind the original OW|OT project was it's OK to do risky things. There was a risk that the OW|OT team wouldn't be able to produce anything (thankfully, we did). There was a risk that the software wouldn't be sustained (unfortunately, it hasn't been). And there's a risk that the idea of bringing rapid development methodology into academia will fail to have real impact on the way academic software dev is done, if experiments like Anthologize fail to pan out in the medium-to-long run. By funding development in a crowdsourced way, I hope to demonstrate (a) that people actually do care about seeing this kind of software succeed, and (b) that there's more than one way to fund it.
I'm not really doing this for the money. I already have plenty of paying work. Putting money into the equation just lets me prioritize Anthologize in a way that I otherwise wouldn't be able to justify, given the amount of free software dev I already do.
Pledge today
So, if you're interested in supporting this experiment, please pledge today! Check out the perks listed below - all contributors will be listed on the plugin's Credits page.
