[GRASS-dev] Call for documentation help

[Michael Barton]

The GRASS team needs your help. As you all are well aware, GRASS is 
enormously sophisticated spatial analysis sophisticated. This also makes 
it equally complicated and sometimes baffling for users, with over 300 
individual modules. GRASS has a top notch integrated and contextual help 
system. BUT we need help in making the most of the help system.

As with all open source software, the development team is a group of 
dedicated volunteers who work hard (in addition to their regular jobs) 
to create the first rate software that you all use. They are also very 
responsible in trying to document the program modules they code and 
maintain.

This is where your help is needed. In spite of best intentions and 
efforts, development team members with coding skills need to put most of 
their always limited time into writing and maintaining the code that 
makes GRASS such a powerful and versatile software package. Many of you 
in the GRASS community are expert users even if you do not have 
expertise in programming. It is also clear from the traffic on this list 
that you are regularly willing to share your expertise with others by 
answering questions.

Would some of you be willing to join the development team to help manage 
and improve the GRASS documentation and help system? You don't need to 
be proficient at programming, and because this is a team effort, you 
don't even need to know all parts of GRASS. What is needed is sufficient 
knowledge of some GRASS modules to help improve and maintain their 
documentation pages, a little bit of html (the help pages are in very 
basic html), and a desire to work cooperatively to improve GRASS. Here 
is a partial list of roles that are needed.

Individual module management:
-Add or improve examples. Examples of how to use a module to get 
different results is very helpful
-Add or improve example graphic in modules. Screen shots are often worth 
many words
-Improve and enrich descriptions in English. In many cases, 
documentation was written by valiant souls for whom English is a 2nd (or 
3rd or 4th) language. Native speakers are needed to enrich these 
descriptions.
-Add or improve non-English versions of the documentation. GRASS is 
trying hard to be international and is used around the world. Much of 
the operational language of the modules have been translated to other 
languages (though a lot more help is needed in this too). Help and doc 
pages in other languages would make GRASS much more usable globally.

Overall:
-Documentation management. Someone or ones to mangage a team of 
documentation helpers, ID holes and weak spots in the documentation, 
coordinate with the coding team, and think about documentation standards.

If you are interested and willing to contribute a small part of your 
time to help others use GRASS, please respond to the GRASS Developer 
list <grass-dev at grass.itc.it> and copy the GRASS project team leader, 
Markus Neteler <neteler [at] fbk.eu>

Michael

-- 

Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

Phone: 480-965-6262
Fax: 480-965-7671
WWW: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton