on 4/13/09 2:04 PM, Luke S Crawford said: > My suggestion would be to put it online. Personally, I'd use a wiki, but > that's just me. make sure to licence it such that you can publish > deadtree based on fact-checked revisions of the wiki.
I'm not convinced that a wiki is a good solution for this. Yes, we need a tool that can be easily used by a broad array of people with varying degrees of experience, but IMO a wiki is too unstructured. This kind of document is going to need a lot of structure, and my experience with the human nature is that we generally aren't very good at adhering to structural standards unless we're actually forced to do so. Moreover, I strongly suspect that structure will need to change over time, as we discover more about what we know and more about what we don't know, and how they might be related. And don't forget to factor into that equation that as we learn more about the problem space and the tools that we're using, we may find that we need to completely throw everything away and start over from scratch. > Setting up mediawiki is downright trivial, and it would be a good start. There are problems with mediawiki. I think a less complex tool that allowed us to enforce more structure would be a better choice, at least for now. One thing hampering us is that we can't crowdsource this problem to millions of monkeys, each of which has their own little area of specialty. At best, we're going to have a dozen (or maybe a few dozen) people who make any contribution at all to the document, and only a fraction of those will make any real material contribution. Even if we did have full visibility amongst the entire multi-million member sysadmin community and we could ask them all to come help us, we'd still only get a tiny fraction of them to contribute. WikiPedia works as well as it does because there are over a billion people online, and a tiny fraction of a billion people is still enough to result in thousands upon thousands of material contributors, in a wide variety of spaces. We just aren't that large, so I don't think that the solutions that work well for them will work as well for us. I think we need tools that are more suitable to helping a relatively small group of people try to rapidly develop documents in a more structured way. Personally, I kind of like the Python Sprint concept. But I don't know how we could apply that to this problem. And if even we did a Sprint at each conference, that wouldn't be a lot of work, with as few conferences as we have. With Python, there are lots of little conferences all over the world, and most of them hold Sprints of one type or another. So, there is concerted effort being put in by dozens of people over a period of days or a week or so, at least once or twice a month. That results in a surprising amount of progress. I think our biggest issue is that the largest part of the work would probably also be the most difficult, in terms of defining the complete foundation of all of the basic concepts in the field, and would probably have to be done by some of the most experienced people in the field. There are few such people in the world and they are generally vastly overloaded with work to begin with. -- Brad Knowles <[email protected]> If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
