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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