I think this would be worthwhile session.

Coming from Gentoo, one thing we always put time into was our documentation. It was/is generally goal based and smoke tested. As an example, it's a worthwhile exercise to bring someone into the picture who is completely unfamiliar with your area. Give them a goal and point them at the wiki page(s) you think address the issue. If they are able to accomplish the task without help great, if not, the help you needed to give is what should have been in the document in the first place.

It's too bad our wiki pages don't have a feedback mechanism to allow people to comment on the quality of the information there, and post problems/issues/questions left unanswered that they need.

Regards, Tom

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Dave Martin dave.martin@linaro.org wrote:

Hi all,

Over recent months I've had a steady stream of comments from external people trying to use the Linaro deliverables about the difficulty of getting started, understanding what Linaro produces and how to use it.

My experience with supporting users is that using and making sense of the linaro output is often not nearly as easy as we would like to believe.

Part of the problem seems to be that we may not do a good job of passing on the knowledge and understanding necessary to allow users to help themselves.

Is it worth a session at Linaro Connect to discuss how we could improve the situation?  This probably falls in the "community" area.

Key things to discuss might be:

• identifying and understanding our audience

• providing the "missing manual" (what knowledge do we tend to

assume in linaro that our audience may lack)

• wiki ownership and maintenance (how do we _manage_ the

information we produce to maximise its relevance and usefulness)

(This includes identifying stale/obsolete information, removing duplicates and providing useful indices, contents lists and introductory material.)

Ideally, we should get some users external to linaro to attend and/or provide input.

Cheers ---Dave

---

linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev

Hello,

Part of the problem seems to be that we may not do a good job of passing on the knowledge and understanding necessary to allow users to help themselves.

I don't know if you want user feedback on this thread but here goes... I started playing with Linaro about a year ago coming from an OpenEmbedded and direct cross-compilation background. The most challenging part of the learning curve has been moving from the 'Hey, I downloaded something and look it works' (Linaro does a brilliant job of making this really easy) to 'hmm...I want to change something but there is all this packaging in the way'. For me, this typically means I want to test a change to the kernel or u-boot for Overo. Moving from the standard compile-and-stick-on-a-microSD-card to the method of making debian packages (and understanding the implications of not doing so) was a learning curve. Not all users want to change the kernel but helping users learn to customize the Linaro deliverables (specify specific packages in an image, rebuild packages with different options...) seems important.

Other notes: I have heard of other users getting confused by hardware packs---I actually thought this was well-explained but again struggled trying to build my own.

Two pages that I keep bookmarked are * https://wiki.linaro.org/Resources/HowTo * https://wiki.linaro.org/CategoryHowTo (because sometimes I need that magic tip on some page that isn't listed above) as I usually know roughly what I wish to do but need an example of how to do it 'a la linaro'.

Cheers, -Ash