Idea: Members Handbook (Feedback requested)

#21

Hi Peter,

Thanks for making contact

This would definitely be of interest to us. I’ll email you and look forward to the Wiki going live

Best,

Dermot

#22

Do folks feel this needs to be turned into a proposal for the next members meeting to be voted on or it should just happen?

Theres two aspects, creating @librarians (aka @tomnewsom) and getting a server setup with Bookstack that isn’t on @naxxfish’s server.

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#23

It absolutely needs to be a fleshed out proposal

Changing systems suddenly has not always worked that well for us

We’d really need to know the clear benefits

Also vital: how much labour is involved in this?

Will it be a seamless transition?

Discourse has it’s drawbacks, but is in constant development – there may be fixed on the horizon, plus some of our issues are that we post threads in unexpected places, so better semantics/order would help

#24

So that we can fulfil these requirements could you advise specifically with the Bookstack aspect (as I am not the one advocating for @librarians) what more would a proposal need, as the original post already addresses:

  1. What the proposal is.
  2. What the point is.
  3. The reasons why this solution was proposed.
  4. What the requirements would be before this could happen.

But basically what I wrote kinda already covers this, and has a lot of positive support from members, as for how much work, it would be on the list of works for the membership system’s next update, and some work with someone like @tomnewsom moving the content over and putting links on the old pages, and modifying Discourse’s link bar on the home page.

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#25

First post is pretty damn comprehensive!

Discourse devs have always said the software is not intended to be a documentation repository and won’t add features that make it into one. Therefore, the limitations (search results mixing docs and discussion, limited categorisation, no topic ordering, no pagination, lack-of-tables-of-contents etc) are likely to stay.

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#26

Of course - there’s no reason why we need to make this change suddenly. We have trialled it, put some effort into moving content across to see how it sits, and generally, it was (going by this thread) well received.

Hopefully these are set out in the first post, but the headlines are:

  • One source of “truth” for information about the Makerspace
  • An easily searchable resource (as opposed to Discourse which is polluted with discussion about things rather than concrete information about them)
  • Formatting is identical to the existing Discourse-based documentation, so is straightforward to migrate
  • Consistent hierarchical routes for accessing information as well as a domain restricted search are built in.

That depends on how much labour we wish to put into curating the content, but at a minimum:

  • Set up the server (minimal - it took me about half an hour to set mine up)
  • Copy the content across (could be done over a weekend)
  • Set up accounts for editors (nominally, just directors, techs and any librarians for now)

Ongoing, the effort required to update it would be similar to that required to maintain the Discourse based documentation.

In terms of systems, future upgrades to the membership system will improve the capabilities, but that’s more overarching than just this one system.

It won’t be totally seamless - but by redirecting users from the Discourse pages to the new wiki (something that can be done as each page is migrated) we can minimise the impact.

Discourse is designed to be a discussion forum, not a documentation system - and no development has been done to Discourse which would support this use case. There are several features which make information easier to access (like hierarchies, page metadata) that Discourse wouldn’t want to include.

Also, Bookstack last pushed new code two weeks ago to their master branch, which to me suggests it’s in active development, and working towards a platform which fits our requirements for documentation specifically.

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#27

Yes, my post was a bit of a gut reaction to your ‘shall we just do it?’ suggestion, which felt a bit like railroading

I’m not against this - in favour in principle -but there’s more pressing issues at hand, and didn’t want us to rush in and repent at our leisure

#28

Not at all, I am just trying to see how we move this forward as myself and Chris are looking at a feature list for Membership System 2.7.0

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