[maemo-community] Preparing the hand-over

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi all,

As many of you know, as of January I will no longer be paid to work on
Maemo stuff - I will still keep myself available & plan to continue
helping where I can & when I have some time, but to be quite frank,
MeeGo is a more interesting project to me in terms of volunteer time at
this stage, especially around the area of creating and putting in place
community processes for collaboration.


There are a small number of things that only I have done as docmaster -
and for those, I think it would be wise to ensure continuity, if it is
decided to continue doing them in 2011. Among those, I can think of:

* Elections - while I'm not the only one who has access to the elections
stuff, and I have documented everything that needs to be done both to
create and to generate the results for an election, it certainly makes
sense that some community member step up to the plate & take this over
in 2011, if only to have redundancy.
 (docs: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team/Creating_an_election and
http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team/Generating_election_results)
* maemo.org websites - I have been maintaining the Mediawiki install for
maemo.org, have made sure that it is in version control (at least, the
bits we touch) in the maemo2midgard module:
http://vcs.maemo.org/svn/maemo2midgard/ - I'll happily hand off
maintenance of this to anyone, whether in Nemein or an interested
community member. The modifications are small, and the deployment of
Mediawiki has been documented:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team/Updating_maemo.org_sites#wiki.maemo.org

(Warning: in general, there are a few things on that "Updating maemo.org
sites" that I'm not completely sure about, mostly related to Midgard &
its caching)

* Fixing documentation issues - in general, I have tried in bug reports
& in the wiki to document how to do something as much as I've actually
done them. We now have almost all of Maemo's documentation in the wiki,
so anyone can update it as needed. There is some decent getting started
documentation in the wiki, linked to from every edit page:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Contributing_to_the_wiki
http://wiki.maemo.org/Help:Editing
(by the way, that first link is related to a very small custom module I
wrote for the wiki:
http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Dneary#.22Edit_help.22_extension)

I have also documented the general process for fixing API documentation
issues - but there is also a small gap in my knowledge here. I don't
know how API docs get deployed these days from gitorious. I'll try to
figure this out & get it documented before Christmas.
http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Patching_API_docs

In general, my philosophy has evolved through documenting the Desktop
file format used in Maemo to UTSL ("Use the Source, Luke") and leave a
trace of what you find. I hope that others who are stuck on issues
related to these will follow that philosophy too :)

If there are any other tidbits of information that people feel I should
leave behind I'm happy to help, if I know them - please respond here.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org