OSGeo-Live Quickstart Hackathon - Wrappup

18 February 2013

As we are wrapping up the ​OSGeo-Live 6.5 release, it is worth taking stock of the progress made during our recent ​OSGeo-Live Quickstart Hackaton. This was kicked off by a 48 hour intensive hackathon, followed up by a couple of weeks, addressing issues found.

Our aim was to "... bring OSGeo-Live documentation quality up one notch, by putting the Quickstarts through the same comprehensive testing and review that we have provided for our Project Overviews". We set up a comprehensive ​3 tier review process, ensuring that

• All steps from quickstarts have been updated by the original author,
• The quickstarts have been tested by an independent person,
• And quickstarts have been reviewed for usability and consistency.

And the results:

• at least 24 people joined the hackfest
• Out of 62 Quickstart documents:
  • 40 were brought in line with the latest 6.5 OSGeo-Live release
  • 28 were externally reviewed
  • 12 were comprehensively updated for readability and consistency. These included most of the high profile OSGeo projects.

And what did we learn?

• There is a lot of work involved in reviewing all these documents. We were spending in the order of 2 to 16 hours per quickstart for a comprehensive review. This is quite a bit of time when considering there are 62 documents.
• "Many hands might light work". The many contributors ensured we made some great progress on this task.
• We still haven't finished, but we are now in a good position to bring the docs in line for the next OSGeo-Live release, version 7.0.

Participants

Thanks to all the contributors. (I think there are a few more contributors who didn't register)

• Cameron Shorter
• Angelos Tzotsos
• Hamish Bowman
• Brian Hamlin
• Alex Mandel
• Javi Sanchez
• Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas
• Sergio Baños Calvo
• Alexander Muriy
• Micha Silver
• Stephan Meissl
• David Mateos Pascual
• Roberto Antolín
• Andrea Yanza
• Javier Luque
• Yansa Tejada
• Agustín Diez
• Henry Addo
• Astrid Emde
• Eike Hinderk Jürrens
• James Klassen
• Argyros Argyridis
• Maria Vakalopoulou
• Alexander Muriy