The Connexions Project's authoring system is designed to facilitate collaborative editing of educational materials. This document explains some of the details of that system. The major functionality is divided into two main areas:

• Managing Workgroups
• Managing Modules

Workgroups are a private "scratch area" for groups of authors to work on a common set of modules. This allows people working together to see their progress without having to make it available to the whole world (although workgroups were designed to facilitate multiple authors, an individual may want to create a workgroup of only one person, and create and edit his or her own modules in that workgroup).

To join a group, a current member of the group must add you to the group. There is currently no mechanism for requesting addition to a group; it is assumed that, for the time being, all collaborators have other means of communication with each other and can form groups by common consent. "Leaving" a group means you will no longer be a member. For you to become a member again, a current member must add you again. Once every member of a group has left the group, the group will be deleted. The last member to leave will be asked to confirm this step.

Each workgroup can have a number of modules that are associated with it. In order to actually edit the module, a member of the workgroup needs to checkout the module to the workgroup. Once it is checked out, any member of workgroup who has editing permission may make changes to module that module.

Modules are stored in a robust versioning system called CVS. Version tracking is very important to an open-content project, because when a change is made to a module, some instructors may wish to use the old module and some may wish to use the new module. When collaborating with other others, you may also want to compare previous versions. CVS handles the work of keeping all past and current versions simultaneously accessible without having to store them separately.

Authors interact with CVS only through the authoring interface to the Connexions module repository. The repository holds and provides access to all of the Connexions project's modules. Common activities to perform on modules include:

• Checkout an existing module: this makes a copy of the module in your workgroup. This copy is local to your workgroup and cannot be seen by anyone who is not a workgroup member.
  Note: The term 'checkout' is slightly misleading. It is not like checking out a library book. You are simply making a copy. The original is still in the repository, and others may check it out simultaneously.
• Create a new module: this makes a skeleton module file and adds it to the repository. It also performs a checkout on the newly created module.
• Edit a module: this can include editing the text of the module, changing metadata (like authors and keywords), and adding or removing images, etc.
• Save your changes: this saves your changes to the workgroup scratch area. This does not submit your changes back to the repository.
• Validate the module: this checks to see if your module conforms to document type definition for CNXML.
• Submit your changes to the repository: this command is the complement to 'checkout' and is sometimes referred to as 'checkin'. It takes the changes you made to the module in your workgroup and commits them to the central repository. It will also ask you for a brief message describing the changes you made. This message is useful for others examining the history of module, particularly when working with other authors.