Documentation Working Group
Hydra Connect 2
Friday, 10/3/2014
The Unconference

Attendees

Mark Bussey - Digital Curation Experts - Chief Information Leafblower
Aaron Coburn - Amherst College - Programmer / System Administrator
Christopher DeLuca - Notre Dame - Lead Digital Library QA Developer
Patrick Etienne - Georgia Tech - Digital Library Developer
Jeremy Friesen - Notre Dame - Digital Library Frameworks Specialist
Drew Myers - WGBH - Developer
Bess Sadler - Stanford - Manager for Application Development

Summary

A great deal of the discussion that took place during the training working group was also covered during the documentation working group. Many ideas overlapped between the two topics. If you are interested in this discussion it is highly recommended that you also review the Documentation Working Group Notes from the discussion working group. The majority of the discussion within this working group centered on what training mediums were currently available, whether those mediums were achieving their intended purpose, what other mediums may be appropriate, and how best to organize information about the mediums for the hydra community.

Discussion

What training materials are currently available to the audience at large? Through what vectors?
- Generally these tend to be primarily the various github based tutorials and Hydra Camp sessions.
Lack of training materials can be barrier to entry.
When training materials are out of sync with code, it can sometimes be more challenging than without training materials at all.
Are training materials generally written most by those unfamiliar with the topics being covered?
Are those who are most motivated to create training materials the same people who are relatively new to the topic?
Do those same people tend not to update training materials once they have internalized the knowledge of those topics?
Is there a path for incorporating better practices for the creation of training materials into current habitual practices of hydra developers?

Action Items

Pursue the notion of assigning training / documentation related tickets through github issues for related code repositories.
Possibly join with the documentation group concerning at least one future conference call (if not more) related to how best to address training in the future.

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