James from ShareLaTeX here. I'm hanging around all day today ready for the barrage of pull requests that we're about to receive(!) so feel free to ask me any questions.
I manage the dissertation/thesis template for my department on github. The assembly and dissemination of this template is a purely student-run effort. Typically the task of managing it gets passed to a new student when the previous manager graduates.
The problem I've found with managing it this way is that I'll invariably get a slew of emails from students throughout the semester wanting me to troubleshoot their LaTeX installs to make the template work. 99% of the time the problem is on their end, 1% of the time it results in something that actually improves the template somehow. It would be awesome if I could just point them to your service where a hosted (and guaranteed to work) version of the template resides.
Can I just shoot you a github link[1] to get it incorporated or is there some other process I should go through? (e.g., would you prefer me to send you a zip? I figure what's the point since it's already on github, but if you prefer that approach I can get you a zip)
[1] https://github.com/hootener/LaTeX-Vanderbilt-Dissertation-Fo...
https://engineering.purdue.edu/~mark/puthesis/
Thanks.
This was the unwritten ritual at my department when I was in graduate school too. But no one there really used VCS. Who knows how long that thing had been passed around and tweaked.
Of all the students I've had email me with problems, a vast majority just grab the repo as a zip and never contribute back. Bummer.
Basically, we are able to produce at the end of the conference a pdf with all the course notes, illustrations and links; it's like writing the book in real time.
On a related note, recently at http://paperpile.com/ we've been thinking about ways to help our users connect their reference manager with web-based writing environments like ShareLaTeX. We've had some ideas about how to do this simply and cleanly, but I suppose now we could show you guys (via pull request) rather than tell now. :-)