After the network launches, newcomers will continue have a lot of different concepts to become familiar with, like lack of total order, CashNotes, node age, etc. The best way to document and present that information is in the form of a wiki. Why not start it now?
Currently, these concepts are changing too fast for followers to keep up with, and finding an explanation for a term used requires doing extensive searches in this forum. Weekly updates are a good format for documenting changes, but are terrible as a reference for the current state of things. To find the meaning of a term, the follower has to either spam the weekly update thread to ask and then wait on a response, or search through the forum to find another weekly update that mentions it, which may well be out of date and misleading.
A wiki seems like the best way to document aspects of the network. Then the weekly updates could just be descriptive changelogs which link to the relevant wiki pages.
Not only would a wiki be better for the current followers, but it would make the project look more professional and organised.
Who would you expect to do this work? I can guarantee you, if you are certain this kind of documentation is needed, it will be easier to do it yourself than to get someone else to do it for you.
Ideally team members on the payroll, and then any volunteers who want to clean things up a bit. A volunteer leading the effort would mean that information is scraped from the forum updates, which would be less efficient than the developers contributing directly.
Seriously Great Idea! However, according to the Safe Network project lead, David Irvine, 100% of the team is 100% focused on product development & deployment. No time or resources to devote to organizing terminology, use-cases, documentation, and training guides for potential user communities until they are finished. Would love to see you take on that effort! Thanks for volunteering!
Well this highlights the problem well. Because the concept updates are put in the weekly update threads instead of the documentation you linked, that link is no longer useful as a reference. I’m suggesting that instead of periodically making new documentation, the place to put updates should initially be a wiki.
I did suggest this a while ago too, when Maidsafe had a marketing team, as it does seem to be the kind of thing a marketing team would be perfect for. Copying information from the updates, asking the team to clarify small sections, etc. But that ship has sailed and I appreciate the team no longer has non-dev employees.
100% of the team is 100% focused on product development & deployment
Wellll, that’s not entirely accurate as the existence of the weekly updates shows. The weekly updates are good for building hype, but each one has very temporary value. If we look at an update from a year ago when DBCs were the thing, then could we still say that was the best use of devs’ time?
Changing the format of information release would be a bit of a task of course, but maybe there is some budget to pay a freelancer to make the wiki, read through all the weekly updates, and ask enough questions that they can maintain that wiki.
