Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

I think many people are happy for krisse's come back and appreciate her proposals. She needs and deserves the support of the community. She has done a fine job in the past with her tutorials and has the experience and skillset required for tutorials that aim the general public.

Regards,
Antonio

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

Krisse, don't listen to some of the people here, you have much more experience in creating user friendly tutorials than they do, I have seen your s60 videos which are great resources too. There is a certain expectation of technical proficiency that a lot of users here have for others that is unfair and unrealistic.
Wiki 's are not user friendly and can be confusing to some people.

Tablet School on maemo.org using video is a great idea and I will be willing to help out with shooting or editing.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

Wiki's are nothing more than collections of web pages that can be edited by anyone. They're not inherently user friendly or unfriendly, nor are they inherently confusing or clear. Saying wikis are confusing is like saying text editors are confusing. It's meaningless, as the tool isn't is really relevant to the content.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

They can also be watched, tweaked and guided by people "watching" the pages; giving krisse the ability to get the quality control desired, without sacrificing other people's ability to tweak and improve (e.g., in my suggestion, writing a text version of the provided video).

The other very important thing to realise is that the legwork of setting this up in wiki.maemo.org, including a nice index page pulling content (incl. thumbnails) from YouTube RSS feeds is that using the wiki will make it much easier to get something off the ground quickly: sure, base the UI on maemo.org downloads, but the midgard module there probably isn't suitable for use exactly as-is.

If you want it doing, you can get started quicker in the wiki than waiting for someone who knows midgard to develop and deploy it for you.

If it becomes really successful, and outgrows the technical ability of the wiki platform to meet your functional requirements, there's an easy "business case" to make: it's successful, but it can't quite do a, b & c well at the moment. Then it'd be much easier to get the buy-in to develop all sorts of whizzy midgard modules.

However, I think - without trying - you're underestimating how far you can get building on the MediaWiki install available to you.

Finally, any time I hear "wikis are too confusing [to read/edit]", I like to point out that one of the number one sites on the Internet, edited by thousands of people and used by millions, is Wikipedia. Running on exactly the same software (MediaWiki) as wiki.maemo.org.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

I think what I liked about Krisse's tutorials is that they seem more like a teaching tool rather than a help tool. Wiki seems to me more like an extended help menu. The way I see the Tabletschool is a way for a new purchaser who is NOT tech savvy ie. someone like my significant other who is smart but has no interest in "getting root" to do whatever she needs to do, to actually learn what all their tablet can do.
I would never tell her to go to wiki.maemo.org to learn how to use her tablet.

I use the wiki.maemo.org all the time and no offense to anyone here but its a common theme that sometimes wikis can be confusing to navigate, I hear it all the time about wikipedia. I don't think this is a case of one or the other, I think two streams can co-exist here.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

None of what you've listed here has anything at all to do with the tool, nor is it a justification for creating a whole new tool for Maemo School.

Fragmenting your documentation is never a good plan, and it's definitely not a justifiable one here.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

I don't think that the best way to reach someone who says that Wikis are too difficult to read it to tell them that they are not confused or that Wikis are based on bestselling software. In fact, if I had to pick WORST ways, these would be them.

I think that Maemo is a terrible label to use at this time to approach newbies. What's a Maemo? How can I buy one? Why should I learn to use one?

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

Krisse's original call for action was to create a 100% video site. That is what I am volunteering to shoot and edit for, I am not volunteering to edit a text based tutorial wiki. I have my own web space which I could do something on my own so does Krisse, instead I believe Krisse is doing the right thing by trying to tie her vision into maemo.org.

The real problem here is ignoring the aggressive users who insist that their vision is the only one that counts and realizing that there is more than one way of doing things.

What I don't get is why are people trying to stop people trying to contribute something to the community?

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

Except she seems to want to waste energy developing a new tool that would fragment the documentation efforts and cost paid employees time and effort better spent elsewhere when we already have a perfectly suitable existing tool in place.

What's wrong with attaching videos to wiki articles (and wiki articles to videos)? You get the best of both options, videos for people who prefer them and text for people who prefer that. It's easily indexable, it's easy to edit, and it's easy to access. You can even create your own little walled-garden if that's what you want to do.

None of the technical requirements you've outlined require anything more than the existing software we've got at wiki.maemo.org. It is silly to toss what we've got out the window because of some strange prejudice against existing content.

Because there's a better way to do it which wont waste people's time and energy unnecessarily.

We have the wiki right now! The only thing you need to do to get start is to to start filming. Once you have some videos then stick them up on the wiki. If it's already covered by an existing article, then stick it there, if it's not, then create a new article, stick it in there and wait for somebody to come along and add text.

Want an index page? Create one, you can do pretty little RSS feeds, little category indexes, pretty pictures, whatever you want.

Easy, simple, already setup.

Re: Proposal for "Maemo User School" hosted on maemo.org to replace Tablet School
 

A lot of us have an idea of what a wiki is but I don't think we all know what it is capable of. I would classify Ryan (GA) as a MediaWiki expert. I have seen pages and pages here that up to now, I don't know how they were made and never realized MediaWiki is capable of.

I say start planning the structure of the School already and detail the requirements like: video uploading, modification (I'm not sure if YouTube will let you update a video), RSS feeds, discussion, search, etc. Then, ask Ryan if each of the components will run on MediaWiki.

With regards to discussion of the videos, I can help create a bridge/component to TALK if needed. The only thing I would advice is to have the video discussion inside maemo.org and not through an external site like say within YouTube.