A number of us have been working on some very specific community
documentation improvements over the past year, and it would be great to
find time in Halifax to share ideas and energize each other. Who's
going to be there, when might you want to work on this, and what are
your ideas?
Besides all sorts of editing pages to really focus on writing for the
average reader (often newcomers on community.a.o pages), I really wonder
about holistic improvements to information architecture, especially ones
that normalize and canonicalize all the processes around the ASF way.
Rich and others have already started great contributor ladder stuff, and
also eliminating or consolidating duplicate pages.
One issue I struggle with strategically is: where should different
content live? On one hand, we want to focus on the reader, and meet
them with what they need. On the other hand, we have various
communities/officers inside the ASF who either set policy, or perhaps
just provide advice and best practices. Where should different policies
- and documentation thereof - live?
I think we need to strive towards documentation bits that can be
repurposed, or can otherwise serve both as an intro to a whole process,
as well as a more detailed "why" that process came to be.
I also think organizationally, we need to decide what lives where and
make it easier to keep updated. It often feels like core policies and
strict requirements primarily need to live on /dev (or /legal,
/foundation/trademarks, infra.a.o, etc.), but that they should be
shorter, clearer, and more direct about exactly what their policies are.
And then much of the why content, and content that helps draw newcomers
into thinking about the bigger picture, should primarily live on
community.a.o. If people are curious or want to learn about how we
*think* about communities, come to ComDev. But if existing committers
just want to know how to vote on a release, go to the appropriate and
simple /dev page that just describes the process.
I'll be in Halifax thru Wednesday lunchtime, but will mostly be speaking
and thinking about sustainability all Sunday - including at a
Sustainability BOF in the evening.=
--
- Shane
ComDev PMC
The Apache Software Foundation
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