We're teaming up with some non programmers (writers) who need to contribute to one of our projects.

Now they just don't like the idea of using Git (or anything for that matter) for version controlling their work. I think this is because they just don't find it worthwhile to wrap their heads around the twisted concepts of version control. (when I first introduced them to branching and merging -- they looked like I was offending them.)

Now, we're not in a position to educate them or convince them to use it. We're just trying to find alternatives so that we get all their work versioned (which is what we need) -- and they get easy workflow and concentrate on what they do.

I have come up with some ideas...


tell them to save their work as a separate file every time they make some non-trivial change, and then use a diff on our side to just track changes.
write a program (in Python) that implements the "milestones" in CSSEdit in some way.


About the project:

It is a natural language processing system (written in C + Python). We've hired some writers to prepare inputs for the system in different languages. And as we evolve the software, we'd need those writers to make changes to their inputs (articles). Sometimes the changes are very small (a word or two), and other times big.

The reason we need to version control those changes is because every small/big change in the input has the potential to change the system's output dramatically.


  when I first introduced them to branching and merging -- they looked
  like I was offending them


This is probably because branching and merging are advanced concepts, and infinitely less useful than to simply keep track of the changes.

So why not explain just "commit" (save) and "update"? Two really simple concepts. I'm sure you can explain it in less than 10 minutes.

If you really want to use separate branches and stuff like that, you can do that part yourself without involving them with it.
