The Doc Exchange: alan mcclellan's blog

Had a good chat at CommunityOne with Karsten Wade (see iquaid.org ), who's Developer Relations Manager with RedHat. Karsten was specifically discussing challenges and processes for making of Fedora. One of the things he mentioned that caught my attention was that they nurtured community doc involvement using wikis, and then they outputted to a structured format.

I got a chance to chat with Karsen after his presentation and he elaborated a bit. He pointed out that they originally started with a structured framework (albeit, lightweight) for doc contributions, and the level of contribution was pretty modest. Once they moved to wikis, the level of contribution skyrocketed. He mentioned that they then exported from wiki to structured format. (They used MoinMoin Wiki engine).

This sounded like an interesting approach to both cultivating community involvement and munging unstructured content into a structured format that could [presumably] be leveraged like you would expect a structured document.

He did confess that the structured output was crude, but still, sounds like an approach that warrants further investigation.