Thanks for the reply Michelle. Congrats on taking a leadership role in the Docs community.
The problem with the existing roadmap is that I don't see where the community fits into that plan. Its not untill Phase 3 that the community is involved, and then we're only able to pair up with a sponsor. Along the path DocBook comes into the picture, but if SolBook isn't made avalible then I don't see why community standards can't be put in place now. Naturally Epic can't be handed out (although it would be really kool), but Epic isn't a requirement, its a convience; if we've got SolBook we can use our existing editors and toolchains to produce documentation. I look forward to meeting you at the SVOSUG meeting, but the bulk of the authors are here, not at SVOSUG which is limited by physical scope. Discussion and debate needs to occur here. While I understand that the "writters list" that you maintain is a list of internal authors... the _real_ authors list is here: http://opensolaris.org/os/blogs/ The direction this community has been on, as reflected by the roadmap and discussion to date, seem to be far too limited in scope. This is all about, it seems, allowing external authors to contribute to internal documentation, whether that be man pages, help reference, or full-on manuals. But it is my believe that these are of less pressing concern and of those three its man pages that are of most interest. While we'd all love to work on the official Sun documentation, there is no attribution model at this time, making contribution a questionable thing untill we've figured that out; a classic problem for contributions to inhouse techpubs. The immediate concern of this community should be, imho, to act as a hub for the various documentation efforts occuring across the globe in the community. There is current a sort of "us vs them" vibe due to the lack of coordination which has lead to massive duplication. There is the Sun manual on docs.sun.com, then there is a PTR book, then there are magazine articles, then there are blog entries and online articles, then there is a guy in Norway with a site devoted to the topic, so on and so forth. We have here the oppertunity to try and bring all this together and create a unified effort that minimizes duplication, encourages involvement and attribution, and provides the most targeted and useful set of resources for the people that truly matter most: the end users. We can begin by simply cataloging what exists. Providing some guidelines on how to best coordinate our various efforts. Enlist experts to work together with authors, and vice versa. The Sun doc team is producing quality documentation and doing a good job. But external authors are producing hundreds of pages of documentation every day. If a documentation community is going to be worth its salt it can't stay focused purely on what is in reality only a small subset of the true information base avalible. benr. This message posted from opensolaris.org
