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

[Landon Blake]

Charlie wrote: " 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."

Do you have specific concerns about wikieducator? If I knew what we were
concerned about I could do some digging around next week and report back
to the list.

The only thing I don't like about wikis is they can be ugly, especially
for long text documents. 

Charlie wrote: " 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."

This makes sense. I'd like to work with Ned (if he is willing) and other
interested authors on some recommendations for a docbook tool chain.
This would include tools to catalog docbook, tools to convert docbook to
pretty HTML, and tools to convert docbook to printable HTML.

I'm excited about the possibilities of Docbook, but that may come from
my Java/JDOM and web site design background.

I'll post with some specific thoughts on Docbook later. Maybe I'll add
the content to the wiki first, and then just link to it in my e-mail.

Landon


-----Original Message-----
From: edu_discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:edu_discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Charlie
Schweik
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 9:14 AM
To: Sunburned Surveyor
Cc: edu_discuss at lists.osgeo.org; OSGeo Journal
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Edu] My Thoughts On An OSGeo Documentation Tool
Chain(Long Message)

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

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