Documenting how to develop with & for LibreOffice - a fresh approach?

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi,

On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 01:50:20AM +0200, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> It seems interesting in a number of aspects; perhaps here's a way to
> raise the profile & quality of our own programmability documentation
> (by going there, or by cherry-picking good ideas)?

Hmm, I dont see much difference here between "stack exchange" and "stack
exchange documentation". What exactly makes the difference there? Because I
dont seem much (yet?).

Also what is the difference between SE and ask.libreoffice.org from a
feature perspective? For example, askubuntu.com is running on the SE stack, not
on askbot -- but TBH I dont see much difference featurewise. I assume its
mostly done for visibility.

In general, I _love_ the idea to move our documentation focus to dynamic content
on a platform that is easy to contribute to -- be that SE or askbot. That is
_way_ more relevant and a much better fit to our development model than aiming
for dead tree editions of documentation.

The thing that askbot/SE misses vs. classical documentation is that a structure
beyond one topic and a way to focus and highlight a set of well-maintained
content. A possible approach to this would be to have an index of highly
relevant and well maintained content (this index could be in e.g. in the TDF
wiki linking to various askbot/SE topics). The problem with askbot/SE/wikis is
not the so much providing good content, it is making this content discoverable
(dead tree documentation is even worse at this, though) and not sink in
outdated and irrelevant content.

So -- a draft proposal: Lets have an index of highly relevance topics somewhere
(e.g. on the Wiki) and link the content by topic/chapter to well maintained and
edited pages on askbot/SE whatever.

@Olivier: Unless there are better proposal on how to work on this, could take
up this rough idea and with the help of others grind a diamond out of it?
Thorsten is right, we should any inspiration we can from SE. But even more
importantly we should focus on getting dynamic content up in shape, it is _way_
more important than printable, static dead documentation.

@Others: Open for better ideas of course!

Best,

Bjoern