So I do like Mindtouch (and was a user of Mindtouch back when it was
called Dekiwiki) - it's very nice, I was one of the original
proponents for what is now docs.cloudstack.org back when I was at
cloud.com. It has an incredible feature set, it's incredibly user
friendly, and to boot it already exists.. I actually had hoped that it
would become the project wiki, but for better or worse it never gained
traction.

The things like comments, likes, etc are nice. However, I'd argue that
there are some problems. The first is simply the number of eyes we
have. Commenting gives users a nice place to comment, ask questions,
etc. but if no one is watching, it gets lost in the noise, and at best
is effort wasted by the user (read that as future potential
contributor) and at worse makes that user feel ignored. A good example
of this is [1]. This is a document that Diego Castro originally wrote,
I put the content up, and then Chirauki essentially provided a patch.
(another comment below on this). To my knowledge no one has seen that
comment/patch - certainly no one acknowledged it in the comment system
or fixed the document. This can work well, but it isn't right now, and
you'll see some more comments below about how we spread ourselves. Our
email flow on this list alone is heady, but we also have the -users
list, a forum, IRC, etc. - opening another venue for comment and
participation without contributors to interact with them causes me
concern.

Second, this is not something that's free. It costs many thousands of
dollars per year to pay for the hosting. I am sure that Citrix (and
potentially others) would be happy to pay this for CloudStack, but not
sure that it furthers the projects interest in independence.

Finally, and perhaps foremost in my mind, this is an issue of
resources and the ability to keep all of these services maintained.
The tools we use to build our existing docs permit us to publish with
almost zero overhead. Using mindtouch in this particular use case has
a bit of overhead. It isn't currently automated, and AFAIK there is no
one currently slated to automate the publishing pieces. You mention
having a designer on standby, and while I'd love a snazzy dedicated
docs site, we've also got the project site, that has needed love for
some time, and Joe is the only person who has stepped forward thus
far. I realize that in open source people can work on what they want
to work on, but it does concern me that by retaining Mindtouch, we
must invest lots of time into automating processes (reinventing the
wheel as it were) and making it look beautiful. E.g. it is a net
addition of work, and another service/site to maintain. And for better
or worse I've found that maintaining the infrastructure is one of the
more undesirable jobs in open source projects, and most folks try and
avoid it.

--David

[1] http://docs.cloudstack.org/Knowledge_Base/Customizing_system_VMs

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