2025-11-09
Watching works/A Dry White Season (Film) and reading about South Africa in The Narrow Corridor yesterday made me think about South Africa again — the Soweto uprising, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, all that. I remember reading the TRC reports when I was about 18, at university, because they were online, which was amazing.
That reminded me of an earlier project idea of mine called Reports That Matter (or PublicEnquiries.org), which was about putting online, in one consolidated place, information on public inquiries. They’re an incredible source of high quality information on a variety of topics – including how societies go about truth, justice, and accountability.
I think I still have existing material for this that I should dig out and put up — maybe just a stub page with a link to the old website. I also want to note the idea of rebooting this, based on Git repositories — the concept of using Git repos to host and publish these kinds of reports. I should write up that pattern, which I had about a decade ago.
So, the pattern is something like this: you store content in a fairly raw form, ideally in Git. Then you use it to publish — a simple pipeline where the raw text is stored in a standardized format, maybe Markdown or something slightly extended. Then you use simple rendering tools to turn that into a website or a document. It’s a pattern about simplicity, openness, and reusability — very much like the Unix philosophy applied to publishing, where everything’s a pipe.
The key parts are:
- Store text as plain text, not in proprietary formats.
- Use Git for versioning, collaboration, and publication.
- Build simple pipelines off that — rendering, indexing, searching.
- Prefer static sites to complex CMS pipelines.
I know the Gitenberg project had similar ideas, and it’s something I’d already been doing with Open Shakespeare. So it’s a pattern that's been around a while and remains enduringly relevant: simple, open, and robust publishing based on plain text and Git.
Refs