We need to start building a community (Re: Primer updated with a Changes section)

Mark Birbeck wrote:
> Or we might decide that we want a document that walks the reader
> through lots of worked examples, and so helps people get up and
> running quickly. If so, maybe that's a standalone document in its own
> right, independent of some 'simplified syntax', that provides the
> walkthroughs, and nothing more? (In other words, maybe we need
> separate documents for "RDFa Syntax Primer" and "RDFa Primer".)

I don't think more pages like the Primer or Syntax document is going to
fix this particular set of issues.

We need a wiki - a good wiki that is open to the public to edit. We also
need public community mailing lists. We need to start thinking about
building a community around RDFa. There are not enough of us to address
all of these education issues and the rest of the issues to come.

We can't keep depending on W3C documents to educate the everyday web
developer.

One must only look to the Microformats community to see a good example
of how to get a community started. It would be good to model the RDFa
community from the things that the Microformats community got right:

- Their main website
- Their wiki
- Their mailing lists
- Community involvement

We need:

- A clean/simple website directing people to various RDFa resources -
  like rdfa.info - but cleaner and less generic.
- A modern, skinnable, extensible wiki (such as MediaWiki)
- An RDFa wiki at an easy to remember URI: http://rdfa.info/wiki
- Mailing list for: discussion about using RDFa

The problem with documents is that we assume an order of teaching that
does not gel with everyone. I'm sure Ben, Mark and I have very different
ideas of what the Primer document should be and that is an indicator
that there is a) too much information that we want to put in the Primer
and b) there are numerous ways, all valid, of teaching RDFa to beginners.

Rather than bet on one horse to do this - we should be entering multiple
horses in the race. We should have a wiki that contains simple to
complex examples for every vocabulary that we're aware of and use that,
along with the Primer and Syntax document to teach RDFa to web
developers. We should start building the infrastructure to support an
RDFa community once we get through CR - we're not going to be able to do
this by ourselves. We need a community.

I'll volunteer to setup the mailing lists (mailman) and wiki (MediaWiki)
if nobody else has time to do that. Ben had mentioned some time ago that
it would be nice to keep this stuff at W3C - do we have the capability
of running MediaWiki or Mailman on W3C servers?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny
President/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: RDFa Basics (video)
http://blog.digitalbazaar.com/2008/01/07/rdfa-basics

Received on Friday, 7 March 2008 16:40:34 UTC