> Hello All... this message is aimed predominantly at > the doc community leaders:
Hi Ben! Thanks for your interest in the doc plans for OpenSolaris. I am a new commmunity leader for docs, replacing Ginnie Wray. > > Can we get an update as to where this community > stands right now and where we're going? Of course, we are addressing the items in the roadmap here: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/documentation/feature_docs/publicopensolarisdocroadmap.html For my part, I am meeting with tools contacts to dicuss the 'how' piece and joining user groups to address the 'who' part. Hopefully we'll meet in person at the Silicon Valley UG meeting next week? Are there > objectives? Are there ideas for where we can go as a > community of authors and contributers? Is there a > set of contribution guidelines? Is there a sense of > what we want and what we don't? Yes, yes, not yet, and I think so :) We have made a recommendation for objectives in the roadmap. The current roadmap likely needs to be adjusted according to the feedback and conversations that have been going on. I think more detail about the status of those items in 'phase1' section of the roadmap would help to answer your questions. I would love to hear your ideas about 'where we can go' as a community. From 50K feet, I believe that we can create a culture around writing and publishing in a multi-author collaborative environment with low entry and high value. From what I can tell after 2 weeks there is demand to develop technical information in a collaborative way, so that is where I see this going. As far as guidelines, I have been investigating the style issues this week to see what could be proposed for the problem we want to solve. And I think this gets at the 'what we want/don't want' question also because any guide for contributions should also help us to understand the various types of contributions that are possible. This starts to beg the question of templates and I think we'll get there soon enough. In fact, templates are missing from the roadamp, so I'll add my ideas on this there. > > More simply: Where are we and where are we going? > Assuming there is an answer to this question at > t all. Well, we are at phase1 and we're going for it! :) > > At my last inquiry, some time back, the take away was > that docs were going to stay a closed in-house > affair. The tools (solbook) may or may not be made > public. The procceesses may or may not be made > avalible. That more or less, we're welcome to > provide feedback. I can see how this message is going around. Solbook is not a superset nor a subset of Docbook, so that complicates things. Some of the tags do not translate at all unfortunately. But, this is a problem only as much as we make it a problem. Sun writers use a prorpietary tool to edit Solbook documents, so it is not ours to open source. Again, this is only a problem if we make it one. I think feedback is less than what the existing community wants to provide, frankly. So, we must enable folks to provide more. > > There is a huge band of would-be authors out in the > community, except rather than using XML and LaTeX > their using Blogs. Is it the ambition of the > leadership of this community to begin to play a part > in this growing mass of open documentation? Yes, absolutely! I believe that we should enable development of docs that is as easy as publishing to a blog. We should also participate to a much greater degree. See http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/MissMichelle/IPGstatus_blog.pl.html for a list of blogging writers, I update it each week. We've had one new blogger in our group since I became a member! Baby steps...:) I > strongly believe that it should be. Times are > changing, this project should be at the forefront of > that change, and I believe that this curve points > firmly to metablogging... I'd like to see us lead the > way in this reguard. Excellent, I'd love to hear more about your ideas on metablogging. I agree that this is a natural next step that could happen quickly and provide big value to all. > > Thank You. Ideas from anyone are appreciated. Input > of all times are welcome. But particularly, I'm > interested in hearing from the leaders of the > community. Thank you for this detailed message and again for your interest in the documentation. Please continue to send your thoughts and concerns to this alias--every bit helps to clarify/adjust the direction of this project and increase its value. Michelle > > benr. This message posted from opensolaris.org
