We have 4 days left to the Vancouver’s first Joomla! DocCamp event. This is a community collaborative documentation event for the newly released open source content management system Joomla! 1.5.
Just to let you know that we are not going to sit in isolated seats and write boring user instructions inside a Wiki. This is supposed to be a fun social event, therefore we are going to do the complete opposite:
On the January 19th – 9:00 AM -We are going to get together at a lovely location called The Network Hub ( 3rd floor – 422 Richards Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada ), meet some people, chat and make some friends. This would be a great networking opportunity for all of us and also a chance to learn more about the Joomla! CMS and Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) in general.
How can we participate?
- Bring in your laptops and join us at The Network Hub. Your laptop should be able to access the Wi-Fi signal and go online. Make sure you have a recent version of Firefox, Safari, or (fine!) IE 7 installed.
- Install an IRC client on your laptop as well, so you can join the virtual party on IRC with the rest of the participants in other locations.
- We will give you an introduction on how to get started and collaborate on documentation .
- Have fun, make friends, learn and be a part of a community of more than 150,000 members around the world.
So what exactly do we do?
We are going to form smaller teams of 2 or 3 people and start playing with the Joomla! 1.5 user interface and write about it. We suggest that you pick a part of Joomla that you are comfortable with. For example: the user manager, the Menu Manager, or the Template manager! (You’ll be given access to a sandbox Joomla website for this purpose)
Another cool thing is that we are free to use whatever internet media that we like. For example we can:
- Post screen captures and write about them on our websites or blogs
- Post screen captures on Flickr
- Produce visual presentations, instructional slide shows
- Video clips, podcasts on YouTube or similar websites
- or enter the content directly into the Joomla! Documentation Wiki ( http://docs.joomla.org ) in that case hurry and register for an account with the Wiki right now 🙂
My advice: You don’t have to write extensive documentation for the whole Joomla! CMS ( although we would never stop you ), but perhaps you may want to pick a smaller portion of the software that makes the most sense to you and work on that instead. It is amazing how the small efforts by the community members and participants add up very quickly.
If you are planning to post the information on a website other than the Joomla documentation Wiki, please send the links to your event organizer which would be me (Rastin Mehr – rastin (AT) rmd studio DOT com) so he can post them on the Joomla Wiki.
But what if someone didn’t know anything about Joomla !!!
First of all, the Joomla! version 1.5 has just been released so all of us are newbies at some level. Other than that, it is perfectly fine! Your newbie touch is very useful for us, because otherwise how else can we developers learn more about your experiences with the content management we have developed?
In fact the whole idea of the Joomla DocCamp is to let end-users write small bits of instructions or even their experiences with the Joomla CMS. As developers we often do not do a good job writing user manuals and instructions for the end-users, because some features of our application that are pretty well know to us, may look completely obscure to the end-users.
Joomla! CMS is a free software developed by thousands of volunteers and community members around the world. We thought it would be a great idea that end-users become involved in the process of creating sensible content and documentation that all of us could benefit from.
What if someone is a Joomla! expert?
In that case just come and see me. There is plenty of great documentation which can be done by a Joomla expert too 🙂
So what else will be happening at the Joomla Doc Camp?
I will be blogging, photographing and interviewing the participants and post the content online. If you have a website or promotional buttons for your small business please email them to me (Rastin Mehr – rastin (AT) rmd studio DOT com) so I could post them on our website. We often get a lot of traffic and exposure on the Joomla Camp events, and putting you in the spotlight would be our way of saying thank you for donating your valuable time for this great community effort.
We will also be going to a close by restaurant for Pizza and Beer. Lunch is paid for by the Open Source Matters the non-for-profit organization behind the Joomla CMS project.
Do you have any more questions?
Please post them here as comments and I will be happy to answer them for you.
This event has been sponsored by:
[tags]vancouver, joomla, doccamp, rmdstudio, rastin mehr, community, collaboration, documentation, canada, content management, cms, open source[/tags]