Stet helps you to discuss texts with a lot of people

In eParticipation efforts there is often the need to discuss and edit texts with a larger group of persons. They may be drafts of law texts, papers for parliaments or even recommendations for urban planning. This kind of work is often problematic and needs special attention by those who conduct eParticipation on a larger scale. The Free-Software-Foundation faced the same problems when they invited the citizens of the net to take part in the development of the GNU-GPL licence 3, which is the newest version of the most used open source software licence. For example the Firefox browser is partly licensed under GNU-GPL and its own version of it the Mozilla public licence.

To cope with this task the Foundation developed a small but efficient tool called Stet which of course is free software itself. It allows readers to comment on specific parts of a text and provides graphical help to let readers keep track of the discussion. An example for this tool in action is the discussion about the GLPv3 licence. The trick is that all comments are shown directly next to the parts they refer to and not beneath the text. The colouring helps to additionally structure the comments so that every reader can see immediately which part produces the most controversy.

As Stet is free software everyone can use it in other contexts. This tool could be very useful in different eParticipation projects which involve the discussion of a document of any sort.

Tags: collaberation, commenting, free software, GPL, open source, text