Good points, John. Just to clarify for everybody, the jasig.org site was designed and is managed for us by a hosting company (WebChuck Web), but the content is determined by us. And the hosting company has no responsibility for uPortal documentation. Members of our community representing uPortal, CAS, and Bedework have stepped up as volunteers to maintain sections of that site. But the purpose of the jasig.org site is communication and "marketing" more than anything else. It's not meant to be the main site for product documentation.
Our wiki, on the other hand, is the place for shared documentation, user manuals, etc. (www.ja-sig.org/wiki). While the redesign last year of jasig.org worked very well in creating order for that site, our wiki still suffers from the disorganization that is characteristic of many wikis that have grown organically over a long period of time. I believe the role of the uPortal documentation steward should be to bring order to the uPortal documentation sections of the wiki, to lead the effort in establishing a logical framework for our documentation, and to oversee a process for creating our documentation that incorporates contributions from developers and users, just as you did in the early days of uPortal. I agree with you that this role does not require the incumbent to be a uPortal expert. -Jonathan On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM, John Fereira <[email protected]> wrote: > Vangel V. Ajanovski wrote: > > >> I don't think I have the right knowledge to start and organize the whole >> effort, but I am willing to help and share what I can. >> >> > In 2002 I attended one of the uPortal developers conferences, mostly to > learn more about uPortal and ended up volunteering to take on the role of > uPortal documentation coordinator. I certainly didn't have much knowledge > about uPortal at the time but I wasn't *writing* documentation about > uPortal, I was only trying to keep it organized. A couple of years later we > started using Confluence and most of the uPortal documentation on static > html pages was used to the wiki, and over time lots of pages where created > but as is the case with most wikis it became disorganized. That was > addressed somewhat with the creation of the uPortal manual spaces, and then > evolved again when work on the main Jasig site and uPortal/CAS sites was > contracted out. I'm not sure how the uPortal Documentation steward role > will be defined today, now that some of the uPortal documentation is being > managed by a commerical entity, but when I was coordinating it, it was all > on my own time purely on a volunteer basis. My organization did provide > some support of my uPortal/Jasig activities by funding participation in > conferences but that's not happening anymore and since I'm no longer doing > any work with uPortal, and other Jasig projects, my participation in the > community, other than supporting the conference web site, is almost > non-existent at this point. > > I guess what I'm suggesting is that a uPortal Documentation steward > position doesn't necessarily require a great deal of knowledge about uPortal > but it may require a significant commitment in time to do it successfully. > > > > -- > You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: > [email protected] > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see > http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev > -- You are currently subscribed to [email protected] as: [email protected] To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev
