[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] introducing ourselves

[Repke de Vries]

Hi everyone

my name is Repke de Vries  from Amsterdam and my two reasons to join  
and contribute are:

- a project (attached to the team as freelancer) at the International  
Institute for Social History in Amsterdam [1] that selects a FOSS ILS  
package to replace IISH's Advance ILS from Geac / Infor; we wrote up  
requirements, did a short feasibility study if there would be any  
likely FOSS ILS packages, wrote up test plan + test scenarios and  
just concluded tests with the number one candidate from the  
feasibility phase - which wasn't Evergreen and we urgently await  
Evergreen's 1.6  as a possible better package given our needs
Both the feasibility study and presently looking at Evergreen 1.4  
(while waiting for :-)) is severely hindered by lack of adequate  
documentation.
I agree strongly with Paul's observations in this respect.

- some of you who were at the Evergreen conference (I wasn't) may  
have attended Tigran Zargaryan's presentation where Tigran also gave  
background information on eIFL and the eIFL FOSS program [2] ; well:  
that is one of my hats too - partly involved with Tigran's eIFL FOSS  
ILS project but my main involvement is with the "eIFL FOSS SA  
(southern Africa) Greenstone Support Network" project.
My eIFL work learns me a lot about internationalisation (I prefer UK  
english spelling this word - here you go, even in english) and the  
very different documentation types needed for training (including  
installation and set up), support and advocacy - the latter  
explaining FOSS library software to higher management.
Also doing my own Greenstone implementation work and like their  
approach to documentation very much [3]. That said: an offline doc  
format is much better in situations with poor Internet connectivity -  
as long as reader software for such formats is FOSS.

How I would like to contribute: any dirty work is fine, certainly  
trying out draft documentation in practice (see above), less so the  
actual writing (though my technical writing skills are better than  
all my other prose which tends to go all over the place)

Yours, Repke

web: http://www.linkedin.com/in/repke

P.S.: my second name Eduard might give a further clue to the he / she  
question (talking about ambiguous documentation)

[1] http://www.iisg.nl
[2] http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/services/eifl-foss
[3] http://wiki.greenstone.org/wiki/index.php/GreenstoneWiki

Op 8-jun-2009, om 2:23 heeft Paul J. Weiss het volgende geschreven:

> Karen and I were thinking that with the renewed interest and energy  
> on documentation, it might be a good idea to have us list  
> subscribers introduce ourselves to each other. I would be  
> particularly be interested to know what your interest/need in  
> Evergreen documentation is, how you might like to get involved (or  
> not), and any experience you have with documentation that might be  
> relevant.
>
> I