Category:GSoD
From Audacity Wiki
Google Season of Documentation (GSoD) is Google's experimental program for promoting Open Source Software documentation. GSoD is a companion project to Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
Audacity hopes to be a pioneering mentoring organization for Google Season of Documentation 2019. |
- This table comes from GSoD Ideas where there is a discussion of how to interpret it.
Project Definition
We have several seed ideas for this years GSoD.
- For a seed idea to become an active project it must:
- have clear benefits
- be well defined
- be achievable in the time
Seed Project Ideas
Name | Difficulty | Idea | High Level Benefit | Show us you can... |
---|---|---|---|---|
Information Architecture (Our Top Issue) |
Moderate | Our documentation is organised as a reference. It has ended up with quite some duplication - because there are multiple ways to organise the features. We organise the features by the menu items that invoke them, by the toolbars (which do so too) and thematically. So the same information can end up on three pages. Also we have summary pages and detail pages. The detail pages duplicate some of the information on the summary pages. How can we better reduce or at least manage all this duplication?
We suspect the problem is deeper than presented here. The amount we need to say about each feature varies considerably. Thus in some cases it makes sense to group related features together. In others a feature needs a page to itself. This gives conflicting pulls as to how to organise the documentation. |
'Tighter' clearer manual. | Show us an Information Architecture you have done for someone else, and describe something of how it does and does not match our needs. |
"How do I?" docs | Moderate | Our documentation is organised as a reference. However, most users come to the documentation with a specific question or issue to solve. Some of these are covered in our FAQ. Some of the common tasks are covered in our tutorials and our getting started guide. We think there is a 'long tail' on these kinds of docs. We are potentially able to write docs for the most common issues that affect 80% plus of users. However we don't have the resources to write tutorials on "Tips for placing microphones for a piano" and all the how-to docs that could be asked for, so we would like a clear way for where to draw the line similar to The pokemon Test. We also have a problem in that the 'How Do I' documents may duplicate content. We'd like, mostly, to refer to docs rather than re-present the same information.
|
More relevant and more useful tutorials. | Edit / reshape one important tutorial we already have. |
Navigation in Manual and Wiki | Moderate | The sidebar in our manual is already quite long. Some topics are handled in our wiki, some on our forum. We also have tables, categories and links. How can we better organise the navigational structure so that users can find what they are looking for? | Users can find the relevant documentation more easily. | Help us (work with us) to prepare a survey to users about what they need. |
Video! | Hard | Books and written documentation appeal to older users. Younger users 'expect' youTube videos. Video is also relevant with dyslexia. Media production software like Audacity should be catering for dyslexics. | Reach more users with help by providing information in an audio-visual format | Find / Watch several popular youTube Audacity videos, and tell us what makes them popular. |
For Developers | Hard | We have automatically produced dOxygen documentation that is based on comments in our source code. We also on our wiki have a developer section and there are docs (in GitHub) on compiling that refer to more detail in the wiki. A frequent comment from participants in GSoC was that more documentation on the structure of Audacity in the parts relevant to their projects would have helped. | Make Audacity more attractive to new developers | Do some kind of analysis of the likely cost/benefit of such a project. |