Re: Request for feedback on 'lobbying' paper

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

thank you very much for your feedback.
It is very valuable to me and gave me a lot of ideas to think about -
although I'd claim that the majority of comments mainly push in the same
direction I'd have taken on my own ;-)

I don't have the time to answer individually right now because I'm in a
hurry to prepare the material for the oral presentation. But when that's
over I'll consider everything (also the feedback from the presentation)
and completely revise my paper.

As a general comment: I'll be able to focus much more. In its current
form the text does have aspects of too many text types. It's explicit
intent is to be *not* an introduction or 'getting started', but at the
same time it is somewhat structured like one - making it way too
detailed and long. But as a text to collect ideas it actually works
quite well - which also can be seen from the feedback it triggered.
I will focus much more on pointing out the advantages of the text based
approach right from the start (the first version more has the attitude:
"Look what cool things I have discovered. And while we're at it, I think
they also could be good for you").
I will leave out as much of the technical details as possible and focus
on an endorsement of what can be done (and not how it is to be done).
And I'll probably start with LilyPond right away. For the main part of
the target group this will be the most natural link to get into
discussion. From using versioning it's then a more natural way to extend
to also using LaTeX.

There is one thing which will gain more weight with this approach,
though: the fact that using LilyPond is kind of a one-way street with
the only exit being the graphical output formats. If I try to motivate
musicologists (who are the target group that matters most *to me*) to
use LilyPond, it would be **much** better if I could tell them: "You can
greatly benefit from the potential of the text based approach, but if
necessary you still can deliver a MusicXML file that your publisher can
use with whatever program they insist on"). 
Therefore I will soon come back again to that discussion.

To those who offered more and concrete assistance:
I will be very happy about it, but maybe it's more efficient to wait for
my next version. I will then also accept pull requests.

Best for now
Urs

Am Freitag, den 19.04.2013, 23:17 +0200 schrieb Urs Liska:
> Hi,
> 
> today I finished the first draft of a paper on a plain text file based 
> toolchain for writing (about) music. The target audience are people who 
> regularely author such documents but aren't converted yet to 'our' 
> approach to authoring.
> The text doesn't provide material to 'getting started' but is intended 
> as a mere presentation with the goal of making the target audience 
> curious and to give it a try.
> 
> Although the text is still _very_ sketchy I would like to ask for 
> feedback. Please don't complain about linguistic details, and not even 
> about flaws in the argumentation - as I will completely review the text 
> anyway. My objective was to get through it from start to end as fast as 
> possible ...
> 
> What I would prefer being commented on (of course I'll happily consider 
> *any* comments) is something like:
> - Did I miss crucial aspects ('selling points')?
> - Will it be (given the mentioned revision) convincing for 
> 'not-yet-converts'?
>    Would they understand what I'm talking about?
> - Should I try to make some aspects much shorter/give some more weight 
> and room?
> - How detailed  should I include (code and score) examples, how many 
> screenshots?
> 
> The file is here:
> https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49478835/ulPlainTextWorkflows.pdf
> 
> Best and thanks in advance
> Urs
> 
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