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

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:
>
>  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?

Just a quick comment, rdfa.info is currently hosted @ Creative Commons
where our sysadmin maintains a couple of existing MediaWiki (+SMW)
installations.  We're willing to host a MW installation for rdfa.info
as well and include it in our normal upgrades/maintanance routine.

Nathan


>
>  -- 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 17:05:48 UTC