[Sugar-devel] GSoC Project Contribution

[James Cameron]

Thanks for your offer.  Here are my thoughts.

Risk #1; your beginner guide does not help a beginner.

Risk #2; your beginner guide conflicts with other information.

Risk #3; your beginner guide is abandoned soon after publishing.

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Risk #1; your beginner guide does not help a beginner.

We have several beginner guides now.  A book.  A Wiki.  And
sugar-docs.  These do not help some beginners; witness the questions
we keep getting.

Previous beginner guides have had limited testing.  Perhaps testing
will help.

So in working on this "making a beginner guide" project, please
include tests of the guide against beginners; not yourself, and not
the experts.

--

Risk #2; your beginner guide conflicts with other information.

We have a development community fragmentation problem; multiple
sources of conflicting information.  As we migrate from one tool to
another, we fail to take down the old tool.  You can see this in the
way we have a book, a Wiki, and sugar-docs.  You can see a more
detailed example in https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/issues/114

So in working on this "making a beginner guide" project, please;

- choose formats that are generally acceptable, such as markdown,

- choose one of the existing sources of information and add to it
  rather than make a new source; such as sugar-docs [1],

- add tools to convert that source to PDF, if PDF is really needed,
  (work flow such as markdown to HTML, then wkhtmltopdf),

- help to ensure old beginner guides are removed or updated,

--

Risk #3; your beginner guide is abandoned soon after publishing.

History of previous beginner guides show that one person writes them,
one person publishes them, some other people edit, and then
maintenance ceases as people leave the community.  Rarely do new
people begin to edit.

Root cause is that people vary in their comfort level with specific
tools or sources.  For example, we still have a valuable contributor
who will not use GitHub no matter how hard we try to help them.

So in working on this "making a beginner guide" project, please;

- measure or assess the edits by others, (which will depend on the
  tools or sources you choose to use),

- promote edits by others,

- provide some form of social reward.

--

References;

1.

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/blob/master/how-can-i-help.md
which was formerly
https://developer.sugarlabs.org/how-can-i-help.md.html

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 07:27:36PM +0530, Pratul Kumar wrote:
> *
> Hello all,
> I am Pratul Kumar, I am second year undergraduate from LNM Institute of
> Information Technology, India.
> 
> I have been part of Sugarlabs community and was one of the mentor for GCI this
> year.
> During my initial time it was bit difficult for me to set up projects because
> of the lack of beginner guide.
> I would like to make a beginner guide and work on the project " Making a
> Beginner Guide ".
> I have started observing Coala and other organisation New comer guide.
> 
> I would like to take the opportunity to work and develop this project and
> contribute to Sugarlabs via this project.
> 
> I wanted to start working on it, so I need guidance on how to draft the work
> for this project.
> 
> Regards,
> Pratul kumar 
> 

> _______________________________________________
> Sugar-devel mailing list
> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel


-- 
James Cameron
http://quozl.netrek.org/