Looking for good souls
tim Rowledge
tim at rowledge.org
Sat Apr 22 17:23:57 UTC 2006
I feel the need to make a couple of points here:-
a mailing list for newcomers and other learners to ask questions is a
good thing so long as enough people already knowledgeable and able to
spend time helping actually take part. A mailing list is not a good
place to look for answers to questions previously asked, for when a
user feels a little more confident and wants to do some research
themself. I'm not much of a fan of web-based forae because of the
fragmentation they seem to engender BUT they are an excellent
mechanism to provide an easily growable knowledge base of answers and
advice. A swiki should be at least as good but they do seem to get
horribly disorganised very quickly so perhaps using a web forum in
the style of www.osxfaq.com's would be useful. Some threads are open
to post questions and some are closed as a record of an answer that
should stand alone.
more importantly we need *content*. I'd bet that almost every
plausible newcomer question has been asked and answered but we have
no sensible record. Searching a mailing list archive isn't really
very helpful, especially if the subject was contentious and generated
more heat than light. There are almost certainly hundreds of useful
tutorial snippets - some much more than snippets - lying around the
web. Surely an effective tactic would be to dig them all out, review
them for accuracy, contemporary relevance, completeness and quality
and then try to build a reasonably coherent body of guidance out of
them?
more important still, we need *commitment* to do this and keep it up
to date and answer questions and take the the answers and make them
into newer or better tutorials and articles. We need people that are
competent (or great!) teachers to actually decide to make the effort
and to keep it up. We need people that are good at turning helpful
answers into helpful pages on the web. We need reviewers to critique
the tutorials and help make them better.
I can't provide that commitment since I'm pretty much maxed out by
VMMaker and the general Foundation work. Who can volunteer to do this?
tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..
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