[ecf-dev] Documentation project: call for participation

[Scott Lewis <slewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Folks,

As many of you probably realize, ECF's documentation is lacking.  We 
have upwards of 10 excellent APIs, and although in most cases we have 
working tests, working examples, and javadocs for these APIs, we still 
don't have nearly enough documentation (e.g. overviews...architectural 
and otherwise...tutorials, example apps, snippets, articles, blogs, 
slides, presentations, use cases, etc).  Thanks tomany, we now actually 
have a fair amount of wiki-based docs, examples, slides, etc...but I 
think nearly everyone would agree that it is not enough.

I would like to include in our Indigo plan an item to specifically 
address this in a concerted way over the next 7 months (before Indigo 
release).

This is, however, going to take the effort of the entire ECF community.  
ECF is not corporate controlled (yay!), so we have very few resources at 
our disposal (for anything...from development to releng to 
documentation).   To meet the needs and desires of our rapidly growing 
community, we need to ask for support from our community.  Not support 
via payment/money...but rather support via participation and 
contributions.  I think of this as 'crowd-sourcing'...asking for 
participation and contribution from many, in order that all may benefit 
from the cooperation.

Contributing to documentation is a great, very low-cost way to 
contribute to ECF...and at the same time to make ECF more accessible and 
usable to yourself and others.  Documenting does not have to be in full 
'article' or 'book chapter' form...it can be very short (e.g. 1-2 
paragraphs) about some use case, or some subtlety in an API. It can also 
be working on organizing existing docs (e.g. creating a remote services 
examples page and linking to existing examples), or providing outlines 
or assisting one of the committers or contributors in doing these 
things.   It can be a blog posting(s), responding to mailing list or 
forum questions, or aggregating questions/answers into a faq.  All of 
these are terrific contributions.

To kick this off, I've created a section in the wiki that points to two 
pages for the ECF documentation project [1].

In that section is the ECF documentation project enhancement request 
[2], and a page that lists some of the possible areas for priority focus 
for documentation attention [3].

If you are reading this, and agree that ECF would be more valuable to 
you with more/better documentation, I would ask that you do two things 
to help out:

a) Add yourself to the bug at [2]
b) Go to [3] and increment the number beside the areas that you think 
are particularly important...and/or add new areas that aren't currently 
listed.

This way we can get a handle on which areas people feel most need docs, 
and begin to coordinate around how to address those needs in the best 
way possible.

Thanks much,

Scott

[1] 
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Communication_Framework_Project#ECF_Documentation_Project
[2] https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=329124
[3] http://wiki.eclipse.org/ECF_Documentation_Priorities