Time to consolidate wikis?
Nathan Schneider
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As I've been trying to provide better documentation for newcomers, I'm realizing our documentation is a bit all over the place. Currently we have:
Info pages on Loomio that are in some cases out of date
Official wiki (source)
Community Working Group wiki (full of important info everyone should have)
And there may be more.
I believe that we should have all this information in one clear, convenient place so that newcomers (and oldcomers like me, who struggled to find all this stuff) can easily understand how Social.coop works. To that end, I propose that we consolidate all Social.coop information into a single wiki that is appropriately editable by community members. @Christina Bowen @Tom Resing @Boris Mann @Flancian have expressed interest in this.
A proposal could be something like:
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Bring all material into the official wiki.social.coop and ensure all working groups have access to edit it in Git
Can that system be deployed automatically based on Git repo updates?
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Create a new wiki with SSO to Social.coop accounts, so all members can edit it
I've found dokuwiki works nicely with SSO and is simple to deploy and maintain and edit
Okay—thoughts before we make a proposal?
Tom Resing Sat 12 Nov 2022 10:23PM
I agree with @Christina Bowen 's points of clarity. Thanks for identifying the need @Nathan Schneider and documenting the current state, and also for the beginning of a proposal. Sounds like it's worth taking a little more time to hash out some details, before deciding on a platform and moving all the content over.
Nathan Schneider Sun 13 Nov 2022 12:43AM
Absolutely—that's why I started with a thread, not a proposal :)
Nathan Schneider Sun 13 Nov 2022 1:02AM
Thanks for these ideas!
Ideally, I think every Start.coop member should have edit access, along with strong version control in order to mitigate against bad behavior. All official docs should be linked to the Loomio decision that ratified them. The Community Working Group would be tasked with managing the structure of the wiki, and would perhaps have special admin powers. This approach is predicated on us having a serviceable SSO system to facilitate this.
Alternatively, we could manage the wiki strictly through working groups. In this case, all working groups would have access credentials to the git.coop system, so they could update the wiki through that. This would probably work through our existing wiki.social.coop system, which means it would be a lot simpler. But potentially less democratic.
Nic Sun 13 Nov 2022 11:46AM
Every start.coop member or social.coop? Broadening edit access does seem important otherwise it might as well be a CMS. As every change is version controlled, perhaps better to start broad and tighten if there is abuse/spamming/etc, than plan for that and as a result lock it down and limit participation?
Nathan Schneider Sun 13 Nov 2022 9:30PM
Sorry, Social.coop:) It's a bit tricky to be involved in two co-ops with somewhat similar names!
I agree with you on this. I would prefer to err on the side of openness with strong version control, in the spirit of participation. In the current models, all the wikis are pretty locked down and inaccessible. But this would also require some kind of SSO so that we know which user made which changes.
Nithin Coca @ncoca Sat 12 Nov 2022 11:57PM
I don't think the order is necessarily an issue - after deciding a platform/location, we can move everything we have over first in its current form(s), and then, when its all consolidated, figure out how to better organize and structure it? One benefit of that approach might be that we would know we all have first, instead of searching for it in its separate locations later.
Ana Ulin Sun 13 Nov 2022 12:29AM
I would love to see all of our docs consolidated and made easier to find.
Of @Christina Bowen's excellent list of clarifying questions, it feels like at least #4 ("is there a diff between pages 'officially' about social coop (member-guide / more controlled) vs a community knowledge base (more open)?") is a blocker before moving forward with a more complete proposal.
For my part, I would love to see:
an easy-to-edit-by-all wiki, which would serve as our more general knowledge base, and could also be used by WG for meeting notes and other info; i would like for this to not be git-based, to facilitate editing by all
a separate, more "official" place that collects our bylaws, CoC, etc; this is maybe what is currently the mis-named social.wiki.coop
Nathan Schneider Sun 13 Nov 2022 12:47AM
Can you explain why you'd want to have two separate ones? It seems to me that a transparency-first group like us should just want to expose all the useful info together with the official info. We could also have more strenuous permissions for certain pages, or just monitor the edit logs and make sure all edits are carefully monitored.
Given that we have a track record of letting things get out of date, I want to err on the side of simplicity in the hope that it will be easier to update.
Another way of accomplishing what you suggest is to use Mastodon info pages to memorialize the core official docs, but to keep everything else on the wiki.
Ana Ulin Sun 13 Nov 2022 1:00AM
My concern was mainly that we probably don't want to have e.g. the bylaws editable by all without any kind of auditing. If you think we can accomplish all of that in one system that is easy to edit by all for the knowledge-base-like content, then that's fine as well.
I'm also happy to use the Mastodon info pages for more "official" content, but that takes us back to the two-system solution.
Christina Bowen · Sat 12 Nov 2022 8:58PM
It seems to me that we'll need clarity about a few things before we run with something like that (apols if this repeats decisions already made in social dot coop - I'm new here.):
how do we shape UX? (is this a member handbook only? a community knowledge base? is this aimed at the public non-member interested?) if multiple kinds of folks, do we need clear pathways from the main page to 'choose your adventure'?
who can edit structure (home page, mostly? tagging? not sure...)?
who can edit content?
is there a diff between pages 'officially' about social coop (member-guide / more controlled) vs a community knowledge base (more open)?
Where will the data live? (sounds like now at git? any problems with this?)
What are reqs for wiki tool options to best supports our needs?
If we get clear on at least what we need to find out from the above, if not answering all, then we could run with a how-to-do-it proposal, as the one above.
Happy to help, but new to much of this!