A big second for everything on this list except for item 6.

I am all for mailing list topics being mirrored to the wiki but in my
experience I have never seen a 'community' migrate from push (mailing
list) to 'pull' (forums, wiki etc) successfully. People are just far
too lazy

But 1-5 I think are absolutely on target and I would love to spend
time helping clean/sort/organize.

J

On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 5:56 PM, woodsmailbox
<cosmin.apreutesei@...> wrote:

>> But where to find the resources and maybe in some cases rights to
> put it all together the way you suggest?
>
> Radical ideas give best results when resources are limited. May I
> suggest a quick plan we can all improve upon and then take action:
>
> 1) Put up a wiki and copy/paste the bulk of the data into an ad-hoc
> topical structure. Don't worry too much about structure or formatting.
> The wiki will practically refactor itself in time, and efficiently
> too, because everybody would be doing what he/she likes and does best.
> The startup effort should include at least the fb 2.1 online docs,
> faq, tutorials, release notes, all broken into the right topics. This
> is necessary for it provides an intuitive direction on how to go on.
>
> 2) Let anyone know everything has moved out into the wiki. Direct
> all eyes and ears to one place. Even if content is sparse at first, a
> clear focal point, a hot spot is much more important. Once people will
> go edit the wiki before anything else (as it is most easy), everybody
> will just know with confidence where the freshest content on any topic
> is.
>
> 3) Let anybody edit anything. You'll be amazed how many people would
> jump to help given a tool. Remember two things: 1st, most people
> around here have the community mindset already, and 2nd, they never
> had a shovel so you don't really know how many would start digging
> would they had one, do you?
>
> 4) I do mean a shovel, the lightest you can get! Right now,
> documentation is a "subproject" in the website's "development"
> section, and you have to read boring pdf documents about docwriting
> and docbuilding just to get started. Now that mentality's gotta change
> if you want community involvement. A click on the "edit" button on the
> bottom of the page is the maximum effort a user should do. Otherwise
> he/she is bound to loose focus and interest.
>
> 5) Stop the tyranny of moderators (somebody used the term "thought
> police" in here somewhere). Moderated lists/wikis are lame and limit democracy, another aspect we nerds care about. Remember two things:
> 1st, many of us are experienced users with good command of English
> language and tech writing abilities, and 2nd, we nerds know how to
> appreciate a good manual like the Interbase 6 docset or wikipedia
> (sigh) and we'll love to build one for firebird, but it has to be done
> brick by brick. So give credit to your users. When in doubt, exercise
> argumentation over authority.
>
> 6) Get rid of mailing lists and move the discussion space directly
> into the wiki pages. Discussions will much more likely stay on-topic
> and coagulate around more defined technical topics because the user is
> already on to the topic page when he/she gets the urge to write. Since
> there's no other space to write into, one would try and find the best
> topic to write on first. The wiki is also self-cleaning, because ideas
> of no value would eventually get deleted so they won't waste future
> readers' time, like is the case now with mailing lists. Duplicate
> topics/discussions will eventually be merged together, and so forth.
>
> A few references:
> http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks
> http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiSocialNorms
>
> So, if anyone shows an interest, I can keep the arguments flowing,
> maybe something nice will come out of it :)
>
>
>
>
>
>
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