[OSGeo-Edu] My Thoughts On An OSGeo Documentation Tool Chain (Long Message)

[Charlie Schweik]

Hi all-

(Wonderful to see this energy in the group all... thanks everyone. We're
making progress!)

On Fri, 2008-06-27 at 11:05 -0700, Sunburned Surveyor wrote:
> I want to share some of my thoughts about OSGeo the process and
> formats we will use for OSGeo documentation. This includes OSGeo
> educational material, but a lot of it might also apply to the OSGeo
> Journal.

Landon - Thanks much for your thoughts - very helpful. There is even
another option -- wiki format. We've been contacted by the
Wikieducator.org group to possibly connect to them. From that
discussion, I became more convinced that wiki-based material might be an
option too (I was mainly worried about new derivatives and tutorials
changing in the middle of teaching). I need to investigate more their
wiki, and we as a group need to consider the value of connecting with
them. From a marketing standpoint, at the very least, I think there is
some value.

But generally, my take on authoring is that we should embrace any
content in any format given we want to make it easy for authors to
contribute, and at the same time, like the OSGeo logo/licensing, move
toward some established *recommendations* for authoring educational
content - not mandates, I think. 

I think we need to create a wiki page to summarize our current thinking
on this issue, and add a group task related to "developing recommended
documentation standards". I'll try to do this next week unless someone
else wants to.

Cheers
Charlie