K5Wiki talk:Positioning the wiki

Per Sam's comment on the [Project Policy talk page], this is a how-we-present ourselves page. What information is exposed where, and what information should be very easy to find will help consortium members feel that the wiki (and the web site) are easy to use. If it's easy to use, it will get used.

My mileage varies -- I'm not a seasoned developer in the opensource community, and I might suggest too much detail. On the other hand, I've had a hard time figuring out how to use and contribute to this wiki. Will Kerberos newbies (or opensource newbies) have the same problem?

Right now, there isn't a cohesive outline or site-wide Table of Contents. For example, I bookmarked the site to open up to AllPages because I can't get there from anywhere else.

--Estone 21:04, 10 April 2008 (EDT)

prequel

I'll add the links back in later...

This is mostly about meta-issues, like how to find project policies for other opensource projects (with links to same) than it is about the content of the policies themselves(project as in opensource entity, like MySQL, not as in a development project for said entity. This is what you get when you hire a tech writer.)

How we make this information available implies how easy it is to contribute to an existing project vs. how easy it is to propose a project (and affect the general road map). Some opensource projects hide this information from the general public, restricting it to members.

Come to that, I don't see any obvious information about how to become a "member" on our wiki-- i.e.,set up an account with wiki-editing privileges for the Kerberos wiki. I think all you get is an error message that you have to log in to edit a page (is it the same for talk?). There's nothing at all on the public web site about membership/contribution, nor is there any mention or link to the public wiki. Do we want to control access to information about this level of development? I think this is inherently part of the policy -- who can even find this information? (I think this topic should be considered w/r/t the new website design.)

Eclipse presents this information on the Development Process page. It's pretty structured -- do we want to be this formal? Requests and complaints about policy are entered into the bug log. There's also a link to the version-in-progress, and a link to the diffs between it and the current version.

LaTex offers mailing lists to which anyone can subscribe on their Development Code page. I know we have links to our various mailing lists on the public web site but nothing explicit about a mechanism for using a list to send mail for this purpose Maybe it should be part of the policy page in the wiki? Is that an appropriate use for a mailing list? I hesitate to recommend a separate mailing list for such things (we already have so many!).

BTW, LaTex names their website LaTex Project, which implies that it's not so much a product as an ongoing development process. What we call things affects others' perceptions.

MySQL has a very slick site with a tab for Developer Zone. FWIW, I don't like the site itself because it looks too corporate, not like a friendly opensource home page. I didn't delve into it, but it looks like their policy requires potential developers to pass a certification test. They also have a very nice forum page.

There's also OpenSource HowTo, but it's intended for novices. BTW, I searched on "kerberos" and it only appeared buried in articles about other opensource programs.