What is Open Source Content development, why and how I am building a blog using it, and why maybe you should too!
What is Open Source Content?
Open Source Content is Content that is designed to be publicly accessible—anyone can see, modify, and distribute the content as they see fit.
- Anyone can inspect the content of the blog - because obviously.
- Anyone can modify and contribute to the source (content, code, config, markup, and design) of the site - with the approval of the moderator(s).
- Anyone can reuse, distribute, or extend the source of the blog - as their own.
Here is a great blog on Open Source Software Development, much of which is applicable to content development too!
Why to create open source content?
Their are couple of websites such as GitHub Docs and Ethereum that allow open source contribution to their web content.
Most of the open source repositories hosting website code closely linked with website content also allow contribution to their content. However, I have not seen anyone using open source repositories solely for collaboration on content development.
With open source content, I intend to achieve following:
- Develop genuine and trusted content.
- Enhance collaboration and community participation.
- Improve Quality of the content.
How to easily create an open source blog?
In case you are not familiar with Git and GitHub, get quick-started here.
This website is written entirely in a lightweight Markup language called Markdown 
that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. It is pretty easy to learn and succint to write, unlike HTML which is pretty verbose.
It is hosted on GitHub Pages. It is a service that turns Markdown files into a website and hosts them for free on the internet. If you know how to use GitHub and you need to create a simple webpage, you can’t do better than GitHub Pages. Just create a new repository on GitHub, commit the Markdown files, and enable the GitHub Pages feature.
Read More about Markdown. Get Started with GitHub Pages.
Why to use GitHub Pages and Markdown?
- It supports open source developoment and collaboration.
- You dont need to waste time learning or writing verbose code. Markdown is as simple as writing a detailed email.
- You don’t need to limit yourself to the services and design provided by other blogging sites like Blogger or Medium.
- You don’t need to spend a dime.
Found mistakes or something better to add? You can contribute to this blog by creating a pull request here