Documentation, Community & Advocacy was: RE: Kill this thread, itshouldn't have been one ( was: Re: CYRUS = ....)

[Rob Siemborski]

On Wed, 4 Feb 2004, Joe Hrbek wrote:

> >Although the guys as ASG might not agree but I think it is about time that Cyrus got it's own domain
> >name.  www.cyrusimap.org is free.  I'm more than happy to donate some of my own time and money to
> >register this domain name, and setup some software etc on my webserver for use by the Cyrus community if
> >it is needed.
>
> I think this would be cool, but I think the current Cyrus wiki could
> accomplish the same.  I think that users can send documents for
> submission to the wiki to the list and then rob or ken puts it up,
> assuming it's valid.

Actually, anonymous users can post directly to the wiki.

> Then again, I like the way the php documentation site is layed out,
> users can post comments, etc.  That would be super helpful for a lot of
> people I think.

You can do this on the wiki.

I guess I have a few questions for those who think that setting up another
support site has merit (I'll note that Cyrus-Utils did this a while ago,
and there hasn't been much activity there in a long time).

- What functionality is the wiki missing? (What can we do to make it
better?)

- Is it reasonable to be sending new subscribers some block of text / urls
/ etc ?  If so, what ?

- Should we put a banner in the mailing list archives to point at the wiki
(and FAQ)?  Perhaps a banner at the bottom of each message with a link and
unsubscribe instructions?

- Can we get a volunteer (or several volunteers) who are responsible to go
through the list on a weekly/monthly basis and update the FAQ/Wiki with
questions from that period?

One problem I have definitely noticed is that while the Wiki gets a
substantial amount of activity (8000 page views last month), people
rarely post to it, or post at most a sentence or two (generally to
correct my spelling errors ;).  Is there something we can do to make it
more "friendly" so that people will be more willing to post?  (if its just
an organization thing, would someone like to do the work?) ;)

-Rob

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Rob Siemborski * Andrew Systems Group * Cyert Hall 207 * 412-268-7456
Research Systems Programmer * /usr/contributed Gatekeeper