tim Rowledge wrote:
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?
Let me offer some ideas.
We have started, what we call, an "Answer Board." It is nothing more than a moderated forum where people can ask specific questions. Those questions are answered by "experts." We understand that questions by beginners may not yield the answer the beginner has in mind -- the question may be vague, the beginner may not know how to ask the question, etc. So, a forum seemed to be a good way to "bat around" the question to ultimately arrive at a/the solution. (plus there are not 100 emails for a beginner to wade through.)
The "answers" are then reformulated and stored on a wiki for reference later. A beginner can always go to the wiki first to search. The Wiki is managed by people that are responsible for organizing and managing the question/answer - but they are not necessarily the "experts."
Let me reiterate Tim's urging that a Wiki *must* be maintained regularly. The squeak swiki is so outdated that it's very hard to use and I believe beginners will find it difficult and may, in the end, just give up. A well groomed, up-to-date Wiki is required to pull this off.
We are at the beginning of this exercise, but it proves to be worthwhile. We might consider this approach or a derivative.
Also, please count me in. I sure to learn a lot!
brad