TOPIC:

This board is for continuing the discussion around improving the documentation and general online presence for Xerte. Thanks to everyone who joined the meeting on 4th October - a recording of the discussion can be found here: Recording

In summary, we spoke about how the wider Xerte community could become more involved in the following areas:

Website
A new website is in development that will be less text heavy than the current one and clearly highlight Xerte's qualities. It will include:
- Showcase of interesting and innovative projects
- Blog with posts on new developments as well as guest posts about the use of Xerte in various institutions
- FAQs - this will be an updated and much expanded version of those on the current website

Documentation
There is much to be gained from working collaboratively on documentation. The following things were discussed:
- Carry out an audit of what exists and whether it can be improved – we know there is a lot that already exists but no easy way to access it
- Should documentation be credited to an author/organisation – how would this be done?
- New documentation to be created collaboratively on a community install
- PDFs vs. online guides

Testing
Volunteers are needed to test beta code prior to release. They would get access to an install for this and would need to report back issues on GitHub.

I will create a thread for further discussion of each of these areas. Please use these threads to volunteer to be involved in the work and add any ideas or ask any questions around each topic.

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I realize this is a quite old topic. But it is also pinned as possibly an important topic. Therefore I reply here and don't start a new topic.
Let me first give a brief introduction of myself.
I am Rob. I am Dutch and live in the Netherlands. I am a sysadmin and mainly opensource focussed.
About 12 years ago my children went to a public primary school in the French part of Belgium. This was a special school because lessens were given in both French and Dutch. It was not a very large school, they started in the end of the '90s with less than 50 children. But because of the special character of the school, they quickly grew to over 120 children. As with a lot of public primary schools, especially in the French part of Belgium (with less money available) the accommodation was far from ideal.
I asked the teachers and principal if they were using any kind of ict and what their vision was with ict. They explained they had about 6 10 year old stand alone pc's and a copier. That was it. They had no knowledge, funds or space for anything extra.
Since I was a sysadmin by profession and had some options to make a difference I proposed to start building a network with free/cheaply sourced hardware. I also am a firm opensource advocate and I implemented a central server with a distribution called Karoshi server
After implementing Moodle, there was the question of the teachers to have more interactive options in the LO's. I went searching and bumped into Xerte online Toolkits.
With one of the teachers I even went to a 1 day course in Hasselt, given by Katrien Bernearts.
This was my start with Xerte online Toolkits, some 6 years ago I think.

As I am very much involved with opensource projects, especially with community management tasks, I try to create an inclusive atmosphere and point new users to experienced users so everybody can grow during their journey of discovering the project.

As always and especially with opensource projects, I see several subprojects. And with most projects they seem to be very similar.
So there are the developers, the documentation and translation team, the ambassadors and (the majority) the users.

A project needs every part of these sub projects. And in a perfect project every part has everything 100% covered.
When I look at the Xerte project, there are probably loads of hidden gems, but the 'official' project documentation seems to be very outdated.

In order to overcome this I would like to know what the status is of reviewing the documentation? What 'hidden' documentation could be available? (I am thinking about documentation created by large institutions like Uni of Nothingham)

What action can be undertaken by the community to get the docs updated and available? Would it be an idea to use a tool like readthedocs with edit options on github?
As exampl, this is the readthedocs page for nethserver:
docs.nethserver.org/en/v7/
Readthedocs automatically generates pdf's of the documents. For the NethServer admin guide this is the link to the pdf:
docs.nethserver.org/_/downloads/en/latest/pdf/

What I would like to accomplish is a bigger community involvement in the development of the project.

I would love to hear some ideas and further input.
best regards,
robb

Hi Robb,
Thank you for your timely post. My name is Alison (Learning Technologist at the University of Edinburgh) and I've just volunteered (as of last week) to co-ordinate Xerte documentation. It's a mammoth task given that the majority of us involved in Xerte are working full-time but not an impossible task if there are people like yourself who want to get involved.

Fay got us off to a great start 2yrs ago with a spreadsheet of existing documentation from the Xerte community. We now need to build upon that to provide consistency in end user documentation and a way to ensure future edits can be kept up to date. I'm not familiar with readthedocs but it looks good, this can be something we can talk about at a forthcoming documentation meeting.

We had a meeting last week after the Xerte conference and there are a number of us who want to work on documentation so you would be very welcome to join us. Please do private message me via the forum with your email address and I will be in touch to organise a zoom meeting shortly.

Best wishes,
Alison

Hi Alison,
Thank you for getting back on my post. I mailed you my emailaddress and other ways to contact me.
I gladly join the documentation group. Although I have no pedagogical training or background, I hope I can add my knowledge to the project and the community.
best regards,
robb

Hi Alison, any update?