Open Stack

Stephen Finucane <sfinucan at redhat.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 2019-05-13 at 22:38 -0700, Kendall Nelson wrote:
>> Hello Everyone :)
>>
>> Quick summaries of what we talked about during the sessions in
>> Denver. If you have any questions about anything below feel free to
>> reply or drop into #storyboard and ask us there!
>>
>> Forum (Ibuprofen for Your StoryBoard Pain Points)------------------
>> -------------------------------------------------
>> The Forum session went really well. We had a pretty full room and
>> lots of engagement from basically everyone. There were no real
>> surprises about anything people were having issues with or new
>> features they needed added that we didn't already know about. It was
>> nice that we weren't blindsided by anything and seem to have a pretty
>> good feel on the pulse of what people (that have spoke up at least)
>> are asking for.
>> The most entertaining part was that it had never occurred to us to do
>> StoryBoard onboarding (both for howto use it and another for how to
>> get started on developing for Storyboard) but also might be a really
>> helpful thing for us to do at the next event. We talked about trying
>> to fit it in before the end of the week, but our schedules were just
>> too full to make it happen.
>
>There's an alternative. Personally, I've found images or small videos
>(GIFs?) embedded in user manuals for web apps to be amazing for this
>kind of stuff. I realize these take some time to produce but pictures
>truly are worth their weight in gold.

I said almost exactly the same thing, during this Forum session IIRC:

https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/new-contribs-state-and-deduplication

and the unanimous response was basically "no one has time".

Then I suggested as a poor man's replacement for custom crafted videos
that the on-boarding sessions could be recorded, but IIRC that was not
possible due to budget constraints.  I also pointed out that online
webinars can reach a wider audience, especially considering they can
easily be recorded and uploaded somewhere for viewing after the event.

The etherpad notes are scarce, but I think then someone pointed out
that while video can be great, documentation has the distinct
advantage of being maintainable by the community.

In an ideal world, of course we'd have everything: comprehensive
documentation, quick-start tutorials guides, videos, face-to-face
training ...

But if we only have bandwidth to produce one form of onboarding
material, then maybe documentation is the one to focus on.

Having said that, presentation slides can be a form of documentation,
and can also be maintainable if authored with open tools such as
reveal.js + git.  (Much as I love the features and convenience of
Google Slides, I don't think it's a good choice for material which
needs to be maintained collaboratively.)

>(/me sobs about not having Visio since switching to Fedora).

What type of diagrams do you want to create?  Depending on the answer,
there are probably perfectly good open source replacements.  In fact
as you probably already know, nova already uses at least one of them,
e.g.

https://docs.openstack.org/nova/latest/reference/live-migration.html