[Web Comm] content creation restart

[Jason Birch]

Hmm.  I hope my reply didn't come off as confrontational.

Anyway... I was thinking about marketing to technical users as being
different from marketing to management users.  And I guess I was
thinking about upper management, who have to be convinced on strategy
levels why OSGeo is important, to the exclusion of technical management
who have to be informed which OSGeo components they can use to solve
their business needs.  In any case, definitely not thinking about real
nuts and bolts technical documentation; I agree that this needs to be
met at the consultant or project level.

I think that the current "info sheets" meet a lot of the needs, but
there does need to be some kind of meta-document structure that links
into those.  I think that a capabilities document showing inputs and
outputs would be a good idea, as well as a couple nice model diagrams
(what's the open source equivalent of Visio?) that show potential
enterprise configurations, such as PostGIS base, with GRASS and GDAL for
server-side scheduled analysis, QGIS and OSSIM on the desktop,
MapServer/GeoServer/MapGuide on the web service level, and
OpenLayers/Chameleon/etc on the web.  It might also be useful to target
some proprietary tools in this graph as "synonyms" for the various
levels.  My problem is that I'm fuzzy on the capabilities on all of
these tools, and have probably even made mistakes in this email.

Can you add stubs for the pages that you think are important to develop
to the "Develop Content" section of this page:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/WebComTODO

I've added an item for this week's meeting here so we can talk about
this on IRC:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/WebCom_Meeting_20061004

Jason


-----Original Message-----
From: Jody Garnett [mailto:jgarnett at refractions.net] 
Sent: Monday, October 02, 2006 11:57
To: Jason Birch
Cc: dev at webcommittee.osgeo.org; Fred Warnock
Subject: Re: [Web Comm] content creation restart

Jason Birch wrote:
> Hi Jody,
>
> Bootstrapping is hard.
>   
Indeed, I think I will try and fill in the blanks for the GeoTools
project - according to the priority represented by sample use. Probably
just ask geotools supporting organizations to produce PDFs for the
moment. See if I can hunt down an OSGeo word template.
> I agree that technology-related documents for new users are important,

> though I think that they target a different kind of user than the
"Why"
> documents (technical vs management).
Interesting, I was trying to focus on marketing rather then technical ..

they can read project docs for low level technical, and OGC docs for
standards based technical.
> I don't think that the current approach is wrong, it's just not
complete.
> The "How can I Help" may not be a priority for the users, but it was a

> quick win, and important to the organisation; we need more depth in 
> volunteerism, especially in areas that aren't sexy or cool :)
>
> Unfortunately, I don't consider myself qualified to generate the new 
> user documentation; I'm actually still in that boat of trying to 
> figure interrelations out myself.  I volunteer to beta test any docs 
> you (or
> others) come up with though :)  The documentat that Paul S started on 
> the wiki is a good starting point for web mapping.  Perhaps we should 
> have one of these "Starting Out With" documents for each product type

> "Web Mapping Servers"
>  "Web Mapping Clients"
>  "Desktop GIS"
>  "Geospatial Toolkits"
>   
Once again I do not think we need user docs right now, we have lots of
consultant organizations that we can point people towards allowing them
to get set up. Short term we need to answer some of the questions about
what the projects do, and how they compare to what ESRI has going on.
> I'm not sure if GeoData and Education would be better in this category

> or in a "Resources" category.
>   
Well if we go back to the target audience:
- http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/WebCom_OSGeo_Site_Focus

I can see:
2.1 Government
2.2 Education
2.3 Users
2.4 Development

At the very least the foundation responded to a US Government request
for comment or some such so making that document available should take
care of section 2.1 for the time being.
> As far as branding goes, I believe that VisCom has an RFP for a 
> graphics design company to come up with some logo, type, and colour 
> guidelines for our visual identity, and that they are close letting a 
> contract.  We should be able to leverage the results of this for site 
> styling guidelines as well.  At the same time, Fred Warnock has been 
> working on a new site design template (though I haven't heard from him
for a while).
>   
Yeah, I am thinking more of the "meta site" guidelines, and I would like
to see a couple of project manage to "confirm" before calling said
guidelines complete.

Jody