On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 11:41 AM, Karsten Wade - kwade(a)redhat.com wrote:
On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 03:49:24PM -0700,
tosw_mail.neophyte_rep(a)ordinaryamerican.net wrote:
> In light of the 1956 research paper of George A. Miller of Harvard
> University, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits
> on our Capacity for Processing Information"
> <
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Miller/>, I would like to suggest a
> different organization of the Tale of Contents of "The Open Source
> Way":
That sounds like good thinking. Honestly, I was just throwing
chapters out there without counting how long things got.
I was trained in a era where you wrote an outline of your thoughts
before you started laying down a bunch of verbiage. This assures you
cover the information sufficiently and succinctly while providing the
reader a logical route through the information. While most wikis are
just repositories of random information, I understood this one, at
least in part, represented a orderly statement of a single subject.
One idea that has been out there is to turn each major sub-section in
to a stand-alone page. It makes for easier reference of these
components.
We then stitch them together in to chapters using MediaWiki
transclusions. The table of contents is also constructed
independently.
Some specific comments inline:
> 1. The Open Source Way: Creating and nurturing communities of
> contributors -- Main wiki page
> 2. Introduction -- What this book is, what it is not, essential
> terminology (definitions and pointers)
> 3. Communities of practice -- The science behind the open source way
I like this as a top-level chapter, but it could also be subbed
under the [[Introduction]]. Just something else to think about.
The [[Introduction]] can be similar to an Executive Summary. It
should reference the ideas to be explained, but should not include all
the details.
If you look closely at Chapter 3., in my Table of Contents, it has
acquired all the important content of "The Open Source Way". I'm
worried that is too inclusive or maybe TOSW doesn't contain all the
relevant information.
> 3.1 What is a Community of Practice?
> 3.2 Elements of the Community of Practice
> 3.3 Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice
> 3.4 How to loosely organize a community -- Structure of a
> sustainable community
> 3.5 What your organization does:
> 3.5.1 Right when practicing the open source way -- Distilled
> "Right Way"
> 3.5.2 Wrong when practicing the open source way -- Distilled
> "Wrong Way"
> 3.6 Business the open source way -- Applying the open source way to business
This is interesting, tucking the chapter on applying the principles to
specific domains underneath the communities of practice chapter. I
hadn't seen that connection before, but it does make sense.
Then we could add ongoing domain-specific chapters, as suggested here:
https://www.theopensourceway.org/wiki/Chapter_writing_methodology
> 3.7 Who else to watch -- People in the wider world who write,
> talk, and lead community-oriented discussions and actions
> 4. Data and references -- Data and references that support the book
> 4.1 Books you should read -- Online and offline resources
> 4.2 Stuff everyone knows and forgets anyway -- Common knowledge,
> common mistakes, common recoveries
> 4.3 Great stories to tell -- Stories that illustrate the open source way
> 4.4 How to tell if a FLOSS project is doomed to FAIL - A system
> for evaluating the potential of an open source project
> 5. Appendix -- What fits not elsewhere but only here
> 6. Community Architecture dashboard -- Overview of this effort with pointers
This chapter may be just cruft, leftovers from an earlier version. We
can likely drop it.
Is it an example of proper operational monitoring of an Open Source
project? If so, can we identify others?
> And, perhaps the chapter titles could be more succinct:
> 1. The Open Source Way
> 2. Introduction
> 3. Communities of Practice
> 4. Data and references
> 5. Appendix
> 6. Dashboard
OK, that would work. I guess I have a tendency to like words over
not, but I agree this is supposed to be a bit more succinct of a
work.
Are you thinking of renaming the wiki pages, or just revealing them
with shorter titles in the table of contents?
I would use the shorter titles as the wiki page names. That saves
typing in the long run and allows easier creativity in including them
in reference links within sentences, especially from outside the wiki.
thx - Karsten