Notes from the Creating a common repository of documents workshop

--- The Outcome of the Workshop ---

We decided to put together a metadocumentation that links to various documentations and adds what is necessary. We adopted the Video page on Wikibooks (it was an abandoned stub). We believe a wiki would be the ideal technical solution for compiling an overview of different docs that are already available. Also in terms of ownership a Wikipedia project is ideal.

Therefore, we start this project now:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Video

--- Intitial Doodles ---

There are many documents that would could collaborate on.

Here are some categories. We can cut and paste URL's of existing documentation here.

++Software guides: What software does what job, what are the pros and cons of these applications

++Perscriptive Idiot Guides for Encoding and Applications

++Video Handbooks, Video Making Documents, Overview guides to Video online / distribution

++Indepth Documentation for Geeks, building media servers, installing CMS's, transcoding, command line encoding etc.

--- Edited transcript of the chat ---

http://www.flossmanuals.net

trying to address the duplication of documentation

keeping things up to date

communicating back with developers

http://video.indymedia.org

too specific to be shared ... targetting of the documentation to users

and different types of audiences

http://www.flossmanuals.net

translation and languages is an issue

difficult to manage as there are many platforms

compare with images for example (photoshop, gimp)

topic seems to be too general, a lot of people do encoding for different platforms, so hard to write documentation. inherent problem with writing documentation for video making, too general a topic as oppsed to writing for image maniplation where everyone has photoshop

2 approaches
one is per-package, one is "generic"

per-package may be 50 different help files

Also, the potential expected results are varied as well (not only JPG/GIF/PNG, but too many options formats codecs).

but we can't really define a "standard"

an overview is relatively easier to produce

and then enable drill-down to specifics

http://www.current.tv/

need people as committed to writing documentation as other people are committed to writing software

documentation should be part of the software release

documentation should be written by non-developers for users

video blog? step by step guide to uploading video etc, including video documentation

http://freevlog.org?

screencasting, allows yoou to record and narrate everything that you do on screen
really effective way of documentation, need to look up software for that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screencast

vnc remote desktop software

Screencasting is an effective way to do documentation. Program
Snap X Pro (Mac OS X)

http://freevlog.org/ confirmed

http://www.streamingmanuals.net

camtasia player

http://freevlog.org/tutorial/#

it is to record your screen on windoiws

vnc2swf for multiplatform screencasting

about the screen capturing, also there is http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/

http://del.icio.us/avngoinabox/tutorials

http://audiovideo.ngoinabox.org