Looking for good souls

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Sat Apr 22 18:20:17 UTC 2006


We could give a try to get a web forum but someone should do it :)  
(we even developed a SmallBB in Seaside, but it seems that
people were not into that). Indeed sorting the information is crucial  
and few people are pushing there.
We are planning to write Squeak by Example as a free book, but this  
is secret :) and ideally this could be good that people contribute  
with a main editor. But for now this is still secret ;)

For now I feel that I could start with a squeak-wannabe mailing-list


> 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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