This site is the beginning of a documentation process for the New Mexico Society for Acupuncture and Asian Medicine. While many of the documents that will be housed here exist, the format is not standard and there is no standard authoritative collection of them.

Markdown

The documents will be in markdown format. The main advantage of markdown is that it is a plain text format, this has a number of advantages but the primary ones are:

  1. The files can be opened on almost any computer.
  2. It is easy to look at two versions of a file and see what is different between them.

Markdown can also be transformed into other formats, most notably HTML for displaying on the website and LaTeX for exporting to PDF and print. One could also use Pandoc to create odt or docx files from the markdown originals.

Governance Should be Open

Documents like the society by-laws and committee charters should be available to every member or potential member. In addition, it makes sense to have these documents and procedures available to the general public for the sake of accountability.

By hosting the files on github as plain text, anyone may use the sophisticated mechanisms of github (eg issues and pull requests to name a couple) to point out problems, suggest changes, or have collegial discussions about the documents and their contents. This is simply not possible to the same degree if the files are in a word-processor format on a board member’s hard drive.