6 Apr
2007
6 Apr
'07
12:32 a.m.
Well said!
You can ask the developers for assistance whenever you have difficulties
understanding something.
Sergiu
On 4/5/07, Oova <ping.scan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Guys,
I must be another breed, I barely follow you, 'these' users and 'those'
users, automatically generated comment pages for users to fill it out,
etc..... I am just lost or too old fashioned.
My humble opinion is as follows. In house building as in software, if you
want to enable somebody else to build an application (house) you give them
a
description, what kind of particular applications (houses) you especially
are qualified to help building FASTER and BETTER than usual (Benefits
overview and tools to gain those benefits). You also write, what kind of
skill set might be useful to take advantage of the tools your provide.
Then
you provide the architecture (blueprint, ....) and explain what kind of
interfaces (for walls, windows, plumbing, roofing,...) you created to
enable
others to build. To expedite the break-in you give some sample
applications
illustrating how the architecture, interfaces and tools helped gain the
benefits for some use cases. And I am sorry, no offense, you do not ask
the
engineer who designed the software kit/ housing builder kit do document
it,
otherwise it becomes a kit from highly skilled engineers for other highly
skilled engineers written in a highly specialized technise language, which
the target audience might not speak. You normally ask a guinea pig out of
the targeted audience to try to document, what it understands and let it
build at least one application (house) using the tools provided. And you
nurture the guinea pig with enough food, encouragement and help, so the
snowball effect making the whole target audience aware of your great stuff
can start and you as the engineer can go back cranking out the next great
SW
and tool for even better applications and houses. Making sense? Any
agreement?
I am a guinea pig, I am eager to use Xwiki, because for some reason, I
think
XWiki is a great concept (don't let me go into the 'Crossing the chasm
modeling, or the 4 steps of the epiphany', both great models of how to
establish innovation in the market place successfully and go beyond the
innovator's initial excitement). But you need to let the targeted audience
pick-up the momentum.
Enough Philosophy, if there is any agreement on what I said before, let
me,
Guillaume and other 'users' spread the word in a lower level technise. To
enable us we need to understand
- targeted user (groups)
- architecture
- concept of object model and API
- guts (and not only nice webpages) of successful applications of the
XWiki
(or is the XWikis main purpose to create nice looking webpages? I did not
think so)
Uwe
THOMAS, BRIAN M (ATTSI) wrote:
--
http://purl.org/net/sergiu
I wish this were true... I don't think a second that it'll
work though as:
1) users will say that they cannot document if they don't
know what it does
2) once users know what it does, they usually go away
3) users don't like to document anymore than developers like it
:)
Your points are generally true, but when you talk of "users" you're not
necessarily talking of these users. I'm talking about people like me
who would have loved it if someone had just told them this or that
little tidbit of information, and gladly contribute it, especially when
it's in the context of the document
But I like the idea... and would be game to try
it... if
someone else implements it... (all my time is currently used
for the 1.0
release)
The only reason I haven't already made a start of it is that I haven't
found an HTML DOM parser. Is there one in the myriad of libraries that
come with XWiki?