Next message: Royer, Doug: "Re: FAQ Proposal"
I'll sure out it on the web page.
Cheers
-Dan-
On 2 Oct 2003 at 19:40, Dan Allen wrote:
> One of the great things about this NAV-L mailing list is the cumulative
> wisdom of its contributors. This wisdom is only partially presented in
> the threads that have come and gone over the years which can be browsed
> on a website somewhere.
>
> If we wrote a slick FAQ document, it would do two things for us:
>
> 1) help give quick answers to newcomers so that we don't have to
> reinvent the wheel each time somebody asks a basic questions,
>
> and far more importantly,
>
> 2) it will help us gather our thoughts together and begin to give our
> many threads some organization and structure.
>
> Here is a proposal to be considered by the group, a procedure for how
> we as a group could produce an FAQ that would quickly becoming a
> best-selling book! Well, to a modest audience, but it could be a real
> addition to science if we did it right.
>
> STEP 1: gathering questions
> Let's make a short list of one line questions. We could have everyone
> mail a list of basic and intermediate navigation questions to somebody
> (I volunteer), who could gather and categorize them and remove
> duplicates. This would constitute a basic place to start.
>
> STEP 2: writing first pass answers to questions
> The list gathered in step one could be sent to the group. If there are
> questions that you think you could tackle, you would let me know and
> you would write an answer to the question.
>
> STEP 3: critiquing answers
> Once an answer is written, it could be posted to the group for critique
> and comments.
>
> STEP 4: adding to the FAQ
> Once it made it through step 3 it would be added to the FAQ.
>
> We could in fact attribute authorship to each question answered.
>
> Another thing we could do is choose or even vote and have whoever we
> consider the resident expert on a particular topic write that answer,
> or we could just let people submit answers, or perhaps we could have
> several people submit several different answers to the same question
> and then pick the best one for inclusion in The Document.
>
> Now in some sense we have already done this: just look at our thread
> archive and you will see we have dealt with many questions and some of
> them many times. It therefore stands to reason that someone with a lot
> of time and a nice collection of the past many years of email could
> cobble together an FAQ made of the conclusions of various questions
> that have been raised over the years, but the problem is that multiple
> authors for a given issue make a smooth narrative a rare event (a
> notable exception is George's great series on lunars).
>
> Is all of this way too much process? Is this too much work? Is what I
> am considering of any interest to the rest of you? Does anyone else
> think this would be a good way to tackle the challenge of our bringing
> together all of our various perspectives and knowledge to make a common
> document? Is there a better way?
>
> I await your views.
>
> Dan Allen
> 47°28.915' N, 121°47.850' W
