FUDCON Malaysia Docs Hackfest

[Joshua J Wulf]

On 04/21/2012 01:50 AM, Jared K. Smith wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:03 PM, Joshua Wulf<jwulf at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> I have an idea for an interesting technological and social experiment around docs for the Malaysia FUDCON.
>>
>> We have a topic-based authoring tool that we're using to develop documentation inside Red Hat at the moment, called Topika.
> I'd love to learn more about Topika as well... Is this an open source
> project?  Is it something that mere mortals can start playing with?
It is an open source project, yes. It's Topic Index on Sourceforge. 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/topicindex/

Is it something that mortals can play with? As users of a hosted 
instance, definitely so. Spinning up your own instance? Probably not, yet.

At this point it requires some massaging to get it going. It's going to 
be useful as a hosted solution in the short term (think about hosted 
subversion vs subversion on your own machine), but with some RFEs 
implemented it will be able to act more like git, and support multiple 
distributed repos, which share the same metadata schemas, and can 
interchange topics.
>
>> Last year I sponsored an intern project to integrate it with FAS, so it has a FAS authentication module.
>>
>> I can spin up an instance in OpenShift or EC2 with FAS auth, we can choose a book that we'd like to see for Fedora, and one that matches the prevalent area of interest / expertise of the attendees of the FUDCON.
> For those of us not planning on coming to FUDCon Malaysia (or for
> those who are attending but want to get up to speed on the tool ahead
> of tim), can we spin up an instance now to start learning the ropes?
I'll get the instance up before FUDCON.

>
>> Then at the FUDCON we work with the organisers to make it a feature of the FUDCON that we will crowdsource the book in the three days of the FUDCON. Every attendee can log into the Topika instance with their FAS account, and write one (1) topic, using the supplied template.
> The assumption that every attendee will feel comfortable writing a
> topic on a given book might be a bit of a stretch, but if you pull in
> outside people that aren't able to attend FUDCon, it might work
> better.
Yes, I think the right approach will be the goal of writing the book 
during FUDCON, but given that it's a webservice, there is nothing 
limiting it to people who are physically present at the FUDCON.
>> If it works, then it could a viable way to get a book per FUDCON.
> I love the idea of making sustainable documentation a goal for events
> like FUDCon.  I'll do what I can to support you (remotely).
Thanks!
> --
> Jared Smith