[Lexicon] GeoLexicon / The Good Docs Project : cross project initiative

[Cameron Shorter]

Folks, I feel a whole lot of things are lining up, creating an opportunity
for us to collectively solve some tough challenges. The key being
"cross-domain management of glossaries".

This email is an initial introduction and heads up.

I'm expecting future conversations to be on the email list
https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/lexicon . Please subscribe if you
want to be involved. There is also a wiki page at:
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Lexicon_Committee

Reasons I think we are ready:
* Alyssa Rock has recently built a How to apply/customise a writing style
guide for software projects
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HxtaiayAJZvF0ZfNjLvRH3vYMvGTEki_TK8hFilQNJ0/edit>.
A next step is to explain how to apply word lists and glossaries. And
Alyssa is up for doing the hard work in pushing this forward.

* This opens the use case of: "I want a glossary for my project. I have
some project specific terms to add. I have topic specific terms I want to
source from XXX glossary, and ISO standard terms I want to source from my
standards body glossary, but I don't want all the terms, and ..." This is
the difficult cross-domain management of terminology problem.

* The spatial community is very advanced at trying to solve this problem.
In particular, Rob Atkinson, Ronald Tse and Reese Plews have deep expertise
in this. Through these people we have connections into the Open Geospatial
Consortium standards body and ISO, which will bring gravity and a
publishing pipeline.

* Through the OSGeo Foundation, we have relationships with ~ 50 geospatial
open source projects who all need glossaries, and through the OSGeoLive
project we have contact points with each of these projects. In the
2019 Season of Docs program we connected with all these communities and
updated their Quickstarts. We can do it again for Glossaries.

* We have volunteers from the OSGeo community who have volunteered to help
create glossary terms, and they will have connections to be able to find
more helpers.

* We have access to open source software for term management and the people
who wrote it in this group.

* Through The Good Docs Project we have access to tech writers and a
dictionary editor.

* The Good Docs Project is starting a sprint of work, aligned with Google's
Season of Docs. We are shooting for a soft launch in December, hard launch
~ Feb 2021. This helps frame a sense of purpose, timing, scope which I
think we can tap into.

* There are other initiatives within The Good Docs Project which will
complement this work and I expect there to be cross-pollination between the
initiatives.

* And a few more people and ideas I haven't mentioned because I should ask
before doing so.

Within the next couple of weeks, I'm planning to put a bit of a manifesto
together. Look out for it, and I hope many of you will come along and join
the party.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technical Writer, Google
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