Improving user-friendliness and extensibility

[jpolka]

@dhimmel & @cameronblandford, I was talking with @tonyR-H & @garymcdowell today about out editathon yesterday and wanted to get your perspective on some issues:

• The number of data fields we would like to have is growing (even without the recent bolus added in #20). As YAML files get longer they get harder and harder to read, and more and more overwhelming for people who might be coming into the project casually (ideally there might be a way of prioritizing or highlighting these?) It seems like putting a lot of explanation/documentation into them would negatively impact their readability as well
• It is more difficult than anticipated for contributors to add information; most of the PRs have come from people already experienced with GitHub, and even some of the very dedicated/motivated people on this team have not contributed.
• We will need a way to make our own child policies; current SHERPA/RoMEO policies do not accurately reflect peer review policy groups.

The features I think would be very useful:

• A user-friendly form-like interface allowing users to view and change existing fields. Ideally this could also offer additional help text to describe what a field is, or a way to highlight certain fields to prioritize them. Detailed policies around certain topics would ideally be collapsible.
• For each contribution, to know who made the change and when (of course, this is already nicely done with GitHub)
• The ability to create different ways of viewing the data (which I think Cam's project already does)
• Ideally a way for the less-technical among us to add new fields to all records, and create new child policies (and specify which journals belong to them)

I apologize that these issues were not more obvious earlier on! I would be really eager to hear your thoughts on how best to proceed. Would it be possible to create a way for users to input information through Cam's front end?

Thanks in advance....