Several weeks ago we posted about the migration of our data policy work from Google Docs to Github. With that migration we began to use Github issues for both repos that hosted the Generic Data Policy and the draft Tetiaroa Data Policy. This was great – it allowed us to easily track the changes that we made to the policies. We could close issues when we resolved the issue or updated the policy and when we closed the issue it often was linked to the commit that made the change.
Setting Up Hypothesis
That said, there is still a bit of a hurdle to learning to use Github issues. We looked for a way to have more of a Google Doc comment experience. That led to integrating Hypothes.is in the HTML page for the Data policy.
To add Hypothes.is to our workflow it requires exactly one line of code:
This can be added directly to the HTLM file or we were using R markdown and RStudio IDE as the visual editor. In the YAML section of the R markdown, this one line is included in a stand-alone html file seen here:
Giving Feedback on the Policy
With this little line, anyone visiting the policy can highlight and annotate. This will allow us to easily capture community feedback on the policy from a variety of contributors. I am excited to see how this evolves and what the community adds.
Next Steps
Our next step is link hypothes.is annotations to Github issues automatically so that we maintain the capability described at the beginning so that we keep tracking the changes with Github’s infrastructure. I have started to experiment with rss-issues and Github actions, but still have some testing to do so that the issue title is meaningful.