Re: what needs doing?

[skud@netizen.com.au]

On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 09:37:52AM +0000, Martin WHEELER wrote:
> 
> Has anyone ever suggested we use a WikiWikiWeb (qv) for this purpose?

I hope not.

> At least in the initial stages, as a fast and dirty prototyping method?
> Get out a very quick rough draft, then go on to the "conventional" methods?

I wouldn't imagine that Wiki was suitable for this.  What you really
need is something more structured, IMHO.  For instance, a database which
contained the following:

Task table
	task_id
	parent_task (zero if top level)
	name
	description
	URL
	urgency (important/normal/wishlist)
	degree of completion
	technical/developer contact(s)

Task/package table (links documentation tasks with packages)
	task_id
	package_name

Documentor table
	documentor_id
	name
	email address

Work table (this shows who's working on what)
	task_id
	documentor_id

... then a bunch of forms and queries to manipulate and view the data.
This would let us do such things as "What important pieces of
documentation are not currently being worked on by anyone?" or "who can
I talk to about this piece of documentation?" or "what documentation
tasks are outstanding for these packages?"

I could do a first cut of this in an afternoon in Perl/MySQL.  Using
PostgreSQL (which I'd have to learn first), call it 2 days.  I do this
stuff in my sleep, actually... so if there's some kind of consensus that
people want it done, let me know and I'll do it.

> If not, I suggest the LDP looks at setting up something like TWiki (see
> sourceforge), where we can all drop in and add our two-penn'orth online,
> to whatever document we feel like commenting on or violently amending at
> the time. 

Commenting/annotation is a very different beast to project management.
Sure, you could (and probably should) set up the above to allow
comments, but a freeform comment system doesn't help any in knowing
*what needs doing* unless you have some serious AI search tools :)

K.

-- 
Kirrily Robert -- <skud@netizen.com.au> -- http://netizen.com.au/
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