One of Sunday’s sessions / hackfests, was a discussion on how to re-organize the wiki. As many wiki’s become over time, the Foresight wiki has many pages which are now out of date, especially due to the transition to Foresight 2.0.

One of the comments that was shared by Stef on Saturday as it related to documentation during the community session (more on that in another recap post), was the goal of each tool. Paraphrasing Stef, what I took away was:

  • Foresight website: Permanent and official source of news and Foresight information
  • IRC: Live help (especially to quick and easy questions)
  • Foresight forums: More detailed help that can’t be done quickly in IRC, and user documentation such as tips and tricks and user generated help
  • Foresight wiki: Knowledge base

Foresight uses Confluence for it’s wiki, which is quite powerful, but very different from MediaWiki, which many users are familiar with. Confluence uses the term “spaces” to divide different sections of the wiki. The landing page for the Foresight wiki lists the different spaces on the left, most recently edited pages on the upper right, and pages you follow (customizable by you) on the lower right hand side.

Today the landing page lists every space available. We agreed to display six spaces permanently on the landing page:

  • Common Questions (FAQ)
  • Using Foresight
  • Get Involved
  • Community
  • Development
  • Foresight 1.x

Common Questions

Common Questions will be the home to the FAQ, and other user generated information such as tips and tricks that migrates from the Forums to the wiki. The goal is to have a meeting / hackfest once a month to go through content that should migrate.

Using Foresight

Home to the User Guide, and other permanent documentation for users about using Foresight on a day to day basis.

Get Involved

One of the major changes to the wiki. Today there are spaces dedicated to Development, Docs, QA, etc. There is a lot of overlap that each of those spaces has information for the user, as well as how to join a specific sub-team. We will consolidate this information for the sub-teams in Get Involved, and the other spaces become reference material / knowledge base without cluttering it up between these two areas.

A second, important feature of Get Involved, is to document a list of tasks or ways to get involved. Derrick (aka Devnet) shared some great information in Saturday’s Community discussion around this. It’s easy to have users join a team, but to truly have them involved, you have to share with them the goals and tasks of what needs to be done.

Community

Here is the knowledge base for what the Foresight Community is about. Different than the Get Involved section, this space lists Community news and events, such as upcoming conferences, Focus meeting notes and upcoming meetings, and how to become an official Foresight member and developer.

Development

This space is for developer documentation, including how to set up a build environment, creating packages, or migrating to the QA environment. This space shares the Foresight roadmap.

Foresight 1.x

One of the most in-depth discussions was regarding what to do with all the content that is now considered out of date that relates to Foresight 1.x. We don’t want to just delete that content, both for users or developers, as a large part of our user base is probably still running Foresight 1.x. Here we will be migrating all the wiki content that relates to Foresight 1.x, and archive it. At some point in the (far) future we will have to make a decision on long we keep it, but for now it’s important to have this information available to users, but it does need to be separate from Foresight 2.0.

Other changes to the wiki include:

  • Making other spaces that exist not display on the landing page, such as the Newsletter space
  • Maintenance including removing dead links
  • Deleting or consolidating information on older pages. (Our favorite example page of this is the Howto Save Energy page. We all got a good chuckle.)
  • Applying tags to as many pages as possible to make it easy for users to find content.
  • Updating older pages and creating pages that we need.

One thing I need to find is the Firefox searchlet devnet was talking about, to make it easy to search for content as well.

For a list of the full meeting notes (including pages marked for updating, deleting or creating), you can view the JIRA issue here. Thanks to everyone who attended the session, it was a great discussion with concrete next steps. Now it’s time to make it happen!