Mark - check in with the committee before publishing this. I have posted it here for us to edit and it may not be ready in time for the newsletter.
Community Documentation Effort
There have been some very good threads recently about uPortal and documentation. One of the issues that has been brought up is where do folks that have time for uPortal development spend that time. We all have various pressures from our work and community commitments as to what features, fixes and ideas we should be working on and often documentation doesn't end up high enough on that list to get proper attention. This is an open community with open documentation, that point gets brought up regularly. The problem is the people who may have the immediate interest and time in updating the documentation may not have the required expertise to actually create it. On the other side the people that have the knowledge and experience to create the documentation may not have the time to build the full structure required for a manual and frequently are too far removed from the first time implementer role to take the best approach for creating the documentation.
What I would like to propose is a community documentation effort. We would create a clean wiki space in which we would ask community members who are closer to the initial implementation stage to put together a skeleton of a manual. Everyone would be encouraged to fill in content they can but the expectation would be that once the skeleton was under way the core developers would fill in the content and examples.
We're also looking for someone who would be interested in taking the lead in ongoing management of the documentation. Helping existing and new developers keep the documentation up to date, managing the organization and structure of the manual as it grows and matures. If you think you would be interested in this role email the uPortal steering committee: uportal-steering-committee@lists.ja-sig.org
If you have additional input or ideas for a uPortal manual or documentation please share them.
uPortal Community Call
Over 30 people participated in the first uPortal Community Call on Thursday, December 17th. The bulk of the call was devoted to a review of the uPortal road map for 3.2 and beyond. Eric Dalquist and Jen Bourey detailed a number of planned features and updates. More information about the uPortal road map will be posted on the web soon.
Jen also invited the community to contribute to the uPortal effort in a number of ways, including:
- Helping with documentation
- Contributing code
- Helping with testing
- Participating on the email lists
For those of you that were unable to attend, the presentation will be archived and available within a few weeks. You can also look forward to an announcement about the next uPortal Community Call. Finally, we would like to thank Johns Hopkins University for graciously hosting this recent call.