At 03:41 PM 6/6/2005, Brandon Goodin wrote:
If you want to help out, then you have the power
to do so. The responsibility is not solely on the committers. We
definitely want to be more user friendly. Let's all pitch in and help
it to be better.
"I appreciate the current condition of the documentation as being a
open source project, but it should be better"
I agree. You should pitch in and help make it better.
I realize this thread has mostly died but I wanted to chime in here (I
would have done it sooner but I have some storm damage at home to deal with).
For the past three years I have contributed to another collaborative open
source project that probably has many more contributors and very wide
spread usage (uPortal) as the documentation coordinator. Although I have
contributed quite a bit of the documentation myself there is no way I could
possibly create the complete set of documentation required, and especially
keep it up to date as the product evolves. So, for the most part I have my
to rely on the committers (those actually writing the code) to document
their work and most of them are pretty good about it. My "job" (which is
entirely done on a volunteer basis...I have several other project that I am
actually paid to work on) is to coordinate their efforts.
Like the iBatis project we've got a few mailing lists and a primary web
site. Last year, we started using Confluence and Jira. As a result,
"documentation" is scattered about on the main web site, some fairly
dynamic content on the wiki, and many existing issues are documented in the
Jira comments. Coincidentally this weekend I am doing a uPortal
documentation roadmap presentation at the uPortal conference which will
attempt to identify all the different places where one can find
documentation related to uPortal and a portion of the presentation will be
devoted to making a plea to those implementing uPortal at their own
institutions to get involved; to contribute to the wiki, log issues in
Jira, and document their experiences so that the overall documentation can
be improved.
