As you may know, OSGeo Live is participating in the Google Season of Docs [1]. I am one of your assigned Technical Writers, Felicity Brand, and I'm working on a project to review the OSGeoLive Quick Starts.

Quick Starts

I have reviewed all 50 and scored them according to the existing Quick Start template [2]. You can take a look at the initial status report [3]. In order to help the community improve their Quick Start documentation, I am going to review and improve the template. It looks pretty good and I don't anticipate major changes but I would like to take the opportunity to develop two different versions of the template to cater for the difference in projects. One version for any software that has a graphical user interface (GUI) including:

• Desktop
• Browser-based
• Nav and maps
• Domain specific

Another version for any software that uses the command line interface (CLI) including:

• Web service
• Data stores
• Spatial tools
• Libraries

I anticipate having these ready by 3 October 2019 and at that point in time I'll be asking for help from all of you.

Style guide

One of the things we need is a consistent writing style and that means we should adopt a style guide. I propose the Google style guide [4] but there is also Microsoft and Apple. Do people have strong opinions about this?

Glossary

In the meantime, we have identified a need for a glossary that encompasses OSGeo Live as a whole. Many of the projects have their own glossary and there is some value in collating these. I have started a Google sheet with the initial framework [5]. If you can please jump in and add entries for terminology used within your project, that would be appreciated. Alternatively if you can point me at your existing glossary, I can scrape the terms out. Eventually, the glossary will be migrated from the Google sheet to a page on the OSGeo Live site. There is a trac ticket for this #2184 (​https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeolive/ticket/2184).

Get involved

If you would like to contribute, conversations are happening on the OSGeoLive email list or you can email me directly felicitybrand@…

Links

[1] ​https://developers.google.com/season-of-docs/
[2] ​https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OSGeo/OSGeoLive-doc/master/doc/quickstart/udig_quickstart.rst
[3] ​https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jmSlp9GNwoPupeFJdjPsBnL7vqVG7AiWbWLEGOWEcy4/edit#slide=id.p1
[4] ​https://developers.google.com/style/
[5] ​https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19tulyAEDN5Q5n-u_jlmXIKQjPI2Lwv6fh5Orad1mz1I/edit?usp=sharing