As you may know, OSGeo Live is participating in the Google Season of Docs [1]. We have an assigned Technical Writer, Felicity Brand, who is working on a project to review the OSGeoLive Quick Starts.

Quick Starts

I have reviewed all 50 and scored them according to the existing Quick Start template [2]. You can take a look at the initial status report [3]. In order to help the community improve their Quick Start documentation, I am going to review and improve the template. It looks pretty good and I don't anticipate major changes but I would like to take the opportunity to develop two different versions of the template to cater for the difference in projects. One version for any software that has a graphical user interface (GUI) including:

• Desktop
• Browser-based
• Nav and maps
• Domain specific

Another version for any software that uses the command line interface (CLI) including:

• Web service
• Data stores
• Spatial tools
• Libraries

I anticipate having these ready by 3 October 2019 and at that point in time I'll be asking for help from all of you.

Style guide

One of the things we need is a consistent writing style and that means we should adopt a style guide. I propose the Google style guide [4] but there is also Microsoft and Apple. Do people have strong opinions about this?

Glossary

In the meantime, we have identified a need for a glossary so I have started a Google sheet with the initial framework [5]. If you can please jump in and add entries for terminology used within your project, that would be appreciated. Eventually, the glossary will be migrated from the Google sheet to a page on the OSGeo Live site. This will help end-users understand terms and will also allow us to link out to it and use terms confidently in our other docs knowing it is explained somewhere. There is a trac ticket for this #2184 (​https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeolive/ticket/2184).

Get involved

If you would like to get involved you are very welcome. Please join the OSGeoLive mailing list or meet us on IRC at our weekly meeting.

You can reach out to Felicity directly on the mailing lists or at felicitybrand@…

Links

1 ​https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/ 2 ​https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OSGeo/OSGeoLive-doc/master/doc/quickstart/udig_quickstart.rst 3 ​https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jmSlp9GNwoPupeFJdjPsBnL7vqVG7AiWbWLEGOWEcy4/edit#slide=id.p1 4 ​https://developers.google.com/style/ 5 ​https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19tulyAEDN5Q5n-u_jlmXIKQjPI2Lwv6fh5Orad1mz1I/edit?usp=sharing