Platform for Community + Documentation

The Problem Sep 2018

Getting good documentation is slow and error-prone with the current constraints:

• bottleneck: Marcin has nearly all the knowledge
• translation: fellows must translate Marcin's knowledge
• documentation formation: requires 4 people: 1writer,1photographer,1Marcin,1loose-ends
• quality feedback loop: does not exist -- how do you know if it's good?

And other issues:

• time-consuming to link a Table of Contents (could be auto-generated w/ markdown)
• google slides doesn't translate to HTML

Additionally, there's no onboarding process where there's a feedback loop. This leads to a lot of repetition. Rather than asking a question once, it gets asked, potentially, hundreds or thousands of times. This needs to never happen.

Proposed Solution (Alex)

The core pain point is lacking a quality feedback loop. If you have this plus in-person events, you can actually hire someone or give people a free experience if they do the documentation *especially if the core steps are already in place and what's needed are touch-ups and clarifications*.

Here's what I propose:

• Use Discourse, an open-source forum, to capture questions
• Sync w/ an app so fellows get messages on their phone and can address them
• Make questions easy to find by being adjacent to manual in HTML

 * Scope questions by module and step #
 * Open questions specifically to: feelings, ideas, technical, cross-talk
 * Tag questions by novice / standard / advanced

• During initial documentation, use audio-to-text tech to write instead of typing

By always making it so people can ask questions, we can know when there needs to be different versions when we suddenly make a change and forget to document it. This is also significantly improves the documentation and therefore ppl's xp with building a 3d printer+.