How Door43 works

Submitted by Tim Jore on Tue, 2010-12-14 17:05

We were discussing Door43 in a recent meeting and one of the attendees sketched on a sheet of paper the basic overview of how Door43 works. His sketch was brilliant in its simplicity and accuracy and, with only minor modifications, is reproduced here (click the image to see a larger version):

The simplified overview of how Door43 works

This sketch highlights the crucial aspects of the workflow:

  1. Content creators create discipleship resources.
  2. The discipleship resources are imported into Door43, usually as text and graphics (from Word Documents, PDFs, etc.)
  3. The resources can then be used as is or converted into audio and/or video formats.
  4. The unrestricted discipleship resources can then be used by the global church anywhere in the world.

This is, obviously, an oversimplified illustration of how Door43 actually works. The image below models the same workflow but also accounts for the translation and adaptation of resources into other languages, as well as illustrating how the resources can be distributed via the Internet to computers, mobile phones, media players, CDs/DVDs and in print. (Note, click the picture to see a larger version, then click the icon in the lower right of the picture to expand the image to full-size.)

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 2011-02-03 18:05.

Derivative Works

The only thing I wonder about in this approach is how do people create derivative works. Do the MediaWiki pages have links to the source documents.

For example see http://www.shellbook.com/.

Submitted by admin on Thu, 2011-02-03 22:37.

BY-SA + metadata

All the content in Door43 is released by the people that create the resources under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike which, as the name of the license suggests, requires attribution of the original work as the first condition for using the content in a derivative work. We have looked at a number of different ways to do this and are probably going to use metadata fields (using Semantic MediaWiki) with a URL as the attribution link. Creators of content in Door43 would be able to specify the URL of the resource that should be used in the attribution metadata field for the link, if the original resource is located on another website.

These metadata fields will be accessible internally to Door43 and externally for indexing (semantic web). For translations of resources on Door43, interwiki links will be used in addition to the metadata fields, providing easy navigation and identification of the relationship between the resources.