The GRASS team needs your help. As you all are well aware, GRASS is
enormously sophisticated spatial analysis sophisticated. This also makes
it equally complicated and sometimes baffling for users, with over 300
individual modules. GRASS has a top notch integrated and contextual help
system. BUT we need help in making the most of the help system.
As with all open source software, the development team is a group of
dedicated volunteers who work hard (in addition to their regular jobs)
to create the first rate software that you all use. They are also very
responsible in trying to document the program modules they code and
maintain.
This is where your help is needed. In spite of best intentions and
efforts, development team members with coding skills need to put most of
their always limited time into writing and maintaining the code that
makes GRASS such a powerful and versatile software package. Many of you
in the GRASS community are expert users even if you do not have
expertise in programming. It is also clear from the traffic on this list
that you are regularly willing to share your expertise with others by
answering questions.
Would some of you be willing to join the development team to help manage
and improve the GRASS documentation and help system? You don't need to
be proficient at programming, and because this is a team effort, you
don't even need to know all parts of GRASS. What is needed is sufficient
knowledge of some GRASS modules to help improve and maintain their
documentation pages, a little bit of html (the help pages are in very
basic html), and a desire to work cooperatively to improve GRASS. Here
is a partial list of roles that are needed.
Individual module management:
-Add or improve examples. Examples of how to use a module to get
different results is very helpful
-Add or improve example graphic in modules. Screen shots are often worth
many words
-Improve and enrich descriptions in English. In many cases,
documentation was written by valiant souls for whom English is a 2nd (or
3rd or 4th) language. Native speakers are needed to enrich these
descriptions.
-Add or improve non-English versions of the documentation. GRASS is
trying hard to be international and is used around the world. Much of
the operational language of the modules have been translated to other
languages (though a lot more help is needed in this too). Help and doc
pages in other languages would make GRASS much more usable globally.
Overall:
-Documentation management. Someone or ones to mangage a team of
documentation helpers, ID holes and weak spots in the documentation,
coordinate with the coding team, and think about documentation standards.
If you are interested and willing to contribute a small part of your
time to help others use GRASS, please respond to the GRASS Developer
list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> and copy the GRASS project team leader,
Markus Neteler <neteler [at] fbk.eu>
Michael
--
Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University
Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671
WWW: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton
_______________________________________________
grassuser mailing list
grassuser@grass.itc.it
http://grass.itc.it/mailman/listinfo/grassuser
