Hi all,
A recent internal discussion on documentation led me to putting this out to
general lists and hoping for some opinions and thoughts from others.
One of things the recent 2013 summit was to be used for was as a platform
to launch the mifosx platform and range of products built on top of it. At
present they are Musonis product (currently named mlite) and the
'community-app' (currently being developed using AngularJS).
Nayan indicated they passed out some documentation at the summit related to
the community-app product, some of its features/workflows etc so that
sparked the following thoughts:
1 Zero to very little done in this area to date
=================
To date we as a community have made zero to very little investment in
producing good documentation or marketing material around the mifosx
platform or products built on of it. 99% of content on mifos.org and its
associated sites relates to the now legacy product.
2 A simple and clear website that evangelizes the platform
We need a specific web presence to 'evangelize' the platform. Either a
github.io pages or some other typical nice website that presents the
platform and its merits and just that. Most other projects have this but we
don't. As a community we were able to pull together a clear website for the
2013 summit but not for the platform itself that it was based around.
The present mifos.org and associated wiki spaces are too confusing and a
mess. Trying to fix them up is harder then creating a new presence (can
still be under mifos.org if people want)
This was brought up from day one and has been mentioned as an issue over
the course of the last two years. Its time to act on this now.
3. A simple and clear website (or area of website) to promote products
built on the platform
4A. A simple and clear website (or area of website) to promote the
organisations/people that are collaborating on the mifosx platform, taking
ownership of it and shaping its direction.
5. Platform documentation
Since the beginning of mifosx platform development we have included API
docs that detail what the platform can do. The intended audience for these
are application developers.
All documentation MUST be bundled with the version-ed release artifacts. We
don't want a split between the code and documentation parts of a release.
In this area we are going to look into producing even better documentation
for the application developer and streamline/automate the area where
possible.
At a platform level we probably also want to provide documentation on the
following areas:
- Installation/Deployment Guides (local, cloud, multi-tenant, mutli-node
(load balanced, multi-aws-region etc)
- Database documentation: Clear explanation of schema and how it
relates to 'api' functionality in general.
- Platform functionality documentation: Document the main concepts of
the platform both technical and domain related (micro finance)
Ideally we would be able to tie in the 'API' documentation with the related
documentation that explains in natural language the concept of the system
(whether technical or domain related) and along with that the database
schema documentation that relates to the API/concept area. The idea being
to make it easier for the application to grasp/understand in whatever
detail they wish the particular area
6. Product related documentation
Each product created on the platform will end up creating their own
documentation as this is typically targeted at the end user with lots of
screen shots and step by step instruction on how to do things. For the
community-app any documentation related to it should be released with it.
In common with the platform documentation it most likely needs to be in
easy to view format (html, pdf or both) and most organisations out there
would probably like to be able to brand the documentation as their own too.
--
regards,
Keith Woodlock
"Mifos X" Project Lead Developer/Architect,
Dublin, Ireland.
Skype: keith.woodlock
IRC: keithw_ire
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