FOSS Docs Mini-Summit

[Karsten Wade]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 22:27 +0300, John Babich wrote:
> Here is a first draft at preparing and planning for the proposed FOSS
> Docs summit:
> 
> FOSS Docs the FOSS Way
> 
> A completely free (as in freedom) and automated toolchain would be of
> tremendous benefit to the Fedora Project as well as the FOSS
> community-at-large. To realize this goal, we are proposing an online
> FOSS Documentation Tools Summit tentatively planned for late January
> 2007.

My original thinking ... and realize that I am a balance called
"realistic-optimist" ... is that we'll be lucky if we can have our own
ideas together for talking amongst ourselves by January.  I guess my
caution comes from thinking, we'll get one, best chance to reach out to
other FLOSS projects, and I want to be sure we have our own activities
and thinking together first.

From the way you structured the content below, I think you are looking
for a summit as a way to prepare all of our thinking and activities as a
larger group.  This is fun, riskier, and enticing.

So, it is an interesting and different take.  I'm intrigued by these
many directions.  

Do we know enough about what we want to and think we should do as the
documentation project of Fedora?

I think we need to first and immediately take these ideas within the
Fedora Project and see where the ideas go.  The other contributors
ultimately look to us to dream up and implement the best solutions, but
many of our target upstream and cross-stream players are already working
in Fedora, and we're going to keep them involved anyway in connecting
with other FLOSS projects.  The sooner, the merrier.

Then (perhaps) we want a pre-summit with some folks who arise from these
conversations, if we can't get it all nailed down via list/Wiki.

What think ye others?

[snip structure as [Excerpted from
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/WorkFlowIdeas]]

> We hope to arrive at a community-wide consensus on the best way to proceed.

Before we get ahead, what is our Fedora-wide consensus on the way to
proceed?  Gaining that has the advantage of gaining buy-in from upstream
projects (GNOME, Apache, etc.).

Perhaps we need to start and motivate a new thread or three on
fedora-devel-l and/or fedora-maintainers.  What about other
contributors?  There really is no "fedora-contributors-l" but we could
use f-announce-l.  What do we want to find out from that?

* How do we want to interact with other content sharing with upstream?
* What is the nature of what we want to house (be upstream) in the
Fedora Project?
  - Artwork, branding, trademarks
  - Distro specific layer on top of any common documents
* What do we want to support as the Fedora project for work going
upstream?
  - man/info
  - /usr/share/doc/*
  - Javadoc, doxygen, etc.
  - Other?
* How do we want to get content moving from _here_ to _there_? 
  - Individual accounts in various systems? (*ick*)
  - Through Fedora developers? (better)
    - Similar to Fedora Trans how?
  - Automagically? (best)
* What about common toolchains?  Can we get XML or XHTML from everyone
and some ability to share content?
  - Licensing issues
  - SCM and/or
  - CMS
* Other?

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor    ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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