Re: [OpenLayers-Users] Documentation Team

[Tara Athan]

As to managing the Documentation Team- well, maybe. Lets keep the expectations low and then there will be no disappointments ;) As to tools, how about > a documentation mailing list, > a pitch somewhere on the website for people to join the Documentation Team; > an understanding about procedures. I don't want to step on any toes by editing somebody's documentation and then they get upset because they weren't consulted, ... The New to OpenLayers wiki page seems like the logical place to start. There are a number of things that need to be done there, such as to provide links for the stable release first, then the trunk with disclaimer. (I don't think new users should be encouraged to work with the trunk.) The Quick Tutorial is a good beginning; I could try to create some tutorials that go a little beyond that. A link to the Best Practices page would work here. User Recipes- there is potential here. Perhaps we could group these into beginning and advanced? It would be good to have a link from the OpenLayers home page directly to the New to OpenLayers wiki page. How would I edit the home page to add such a link? On the pitch for Documentation Team members, normally I would expect to see that on the "Contribute to OpenLayers" page, where all the information is about how to help the project, including tickets, patches, documentation, marketing, monetary contributions,..., but I don't see any such page? Tara bwoodall wrote: On Thu, 2008-04-17 at 12:54 -0400, Christopher Schmidt wrote: On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 09:15:41AM -0700, Tara Athan wrote: From my perspective as a struggling user, this is a GREAT idea! I will be happy to contribute to maintenance, and eventually to content, although at the moment I think my practices are better characterized as "worst" rather than "best". Along this same line of thought, I am wondering why OpenLayers doesn't have a Documentation Team (distinct from the developers). There is a need to provide more help to the lower-level users, and documentation written by the developer tends to be difficult for these users because the developer is so familiar with the application that they tend to leave out or gloss over a lot of details that are obvious to them, but not to the rest of us. Because you haven't started one yet :) Are you looking to manage the Documentation team? What tools are you missing? Several of us, have made efforts to add more docs in the form of "User Recipes" ( How someone has accomplished a task ) which is found under the both "User" and "Developers" headings on http://trac.openlayers.org/ The thought was to make the recipes a narrative of the code, unlike the examples which are typically sparse in their comments and more exactly can be found at http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/UserRecipes Then another effort was to catalog the different projects (maybe a better name can be found) that are under development, http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/ProjectsUnderDev That page does have a Documentation with an ongoing effort on how to optimize OL and hopefully more content in the future. .....Bill, -- My e-mail delivery has been unreliable lately, so I am asking for return receipts from all my email messages. OK'ing the return receipt lets me know that my message was delivered. Thank you. Tara Athan Principal, Alternatives to Invasive Species tara_athan [AT] alt2is.com 707-485-1198 PO Box 415 Redwood Valley, CA 95470

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