Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Updated Academy Materials

Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Updated Academy Materials

Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - Updated Academy Materials
Posted by… suppressed (2) by the Post Ghost! 👻

MORE SNIPPING

As President, what actions would you take to ensure that when people put effort into updating things like training materials that results in our website being updated?

First thing we do when elected, is sit down with the Academy Commandant, show them this material, have them parcel it out to the course tutors, and just check briefly “Is this the content we actually want for courses?” I assume it is, because it sounds like Cale worked with the tutors to create it. We should just double check that, especially if it’s been sitting on a shelf for a little bit. If it turns out that all of that is good, then we direct the Commandant to get the courses up to date with that content.

The reason we talk to the Commandant and not the Librarian here, is because the Commandant owns the responsibility for the course content being up to date, not the Librarian. There is no requirement listed anywhere that Academy courses must be in the Library. The Library is not an excuse for having courses that are not up to date. There is no reason why we couldn’t just start with the updates by putting up links to those Google documents and directing people to read those. It might not be optimal that we’re using Google documents, but it has the benefit of being the simplest thing to do that can be done very quickly. The fact that nobody has bothered to take this simple step up front completely baffles me.

Now, if it turns out the Commandant comes back to us and says “Well, I’d really like the courses in the Library/on our website somewhere”, then the next step that I would take as President is to facilitate a conversation between the Commandant and whoever else needs to be part of that effort. If that’s the Librarian, then it would be the Librarian. If it’s TECH, it would be TECH. In this case, it could be both TECH and the Librarian at the same time, since we might want the content in the library, but we also might want the library to be upgraded with some additional features to support that content. So we’d talk about it, and my role in the discussion as the President would be to set a clear direction for everyone to follow at the end of the discussion. “Clear direction” means we all understand what the solution will be, and who will own the responsibility to take what specific actions. Then we let people go to work on those actions, and we check back on a regular basis to see that they are actually getting done. If they’re not getting done, then we see what we need to do to fix that problem, and go from there. We don’t just say “Oh, well the Librarian has it,” and just shrug our shoulders if it didn’t get finished, as if we’re passive observers who are not actually in charge of the club.

Please feel free to ask follow ups; it would help break up this giant wall of text I dumped on you.

Joe

I was going to break this up with a follow-up and explain that if I was in the situation I wouldn’t link to a google doc, as I would expect some long-term member to yell at me if I did so. But I didn’t have a question and it wouldn’t have been super interesting, so I’ll thank you for shedding some light on this instead. It always has struck me as odd that the Library is difficult to update when it looks like it is mostly just a bunch of text.

Adam W.

I understand you would expect long term members to yell at you for linking a Google Doc; some of them probably would have, out of some misplaced sense of following an imaginary procedure perfectly. I’d rather have a bias towards action that we can correct later, provided people in question aren’t committing us to legal terms we can’t comply with by using third party services.

I’d copy the text, put it in posts on the Academy ship, and link that to the MOTD. Though that gets a little hairy as someone could also accidentally find the version that is in the library and use the old course instead of the new one. Maybe that’s why no one took that course of action? But it seems from Command we’re not to that point yet and appropriately starting with a review from the current Commandant.

Well, if we go back to the wall of text, I did mention this detail (emphasis added):

This is where Cale and her course updates enter the story. Cale was one of the people who volunteered for this, and at the time, she had updated the Counseling course, which was the first of her updates that she was talking about in her question to Rob. The thing about the changes she wanted to make that was difficult, is that she was very focused on the visual presentation of the content. The Old Library is almost primarily text, and I designed the New Library to be a replacement for the Old Library, so it would take a lot more changes to the New Library to present the highly specific visual differences that Cale was interested in. There would be tradeoffs involved in adding features to enable people to do this sort of thing; we probably couldn’t have a user experience where editing the content is just like writing a bunch of posts if we have to deal with stuff like text alignment and image embedding and video clips and all this sort of thing. We’d have to do additional design to figure this out.

So I think that was probably the primary concern that stopped people from just writing posts with the content in the fashion you describe. I know from speaking to Cale she has some rather strong opinions about the presentation of content, from her professional experience as an educator. But… I don’t actually know the thought process other people had; people stopped talking to me about this 2 years ago, aside from the occasional complaint about different people not doing anything with it.

I think it’s fair to question whether having perfectly visually presented course is better than having one that is merely textually correct, but we’re quickly descending into details that are more properly the domain of the Commandant rather than the President. I don’t like to micro-manage details unless people ask me to do that for them; I prefer to set goals and give people the freedom and support to achieve them how they see fit.

And yes, the fact that the library looks like a bunch of text, but in fact is not, is the single most frustrating thing about it. Because if it were a bunch of text, or just a bunch of simple HTML pages, it would be very easy to update. Instead it’s a bunch of DocBook XML, and there is a whole bunch of XML tooling that actually turns it into a webpage, and that tooling is really complicated. DocBook XML is a wonderful tool if you have a document that might be a book, that you would want to simultaneously publish as physical paper, a website, a PDF, an eBook, and in Braille, but all from the same source; e.g. you are a technology company or publishing house who can maintain the XML tooling to do all of that and actually have a need to. DocBook XML is terrible if all you want to do is write something quickly and put it on your one website.

Joe

I’m guessing you have no plans to physically print the materials that are in the archive then? They’d look pretty cool on a scroll or something, wouldn’t they?

I do not have any such plan. I prefer the codex to the scroll, personally, unless it’s a single, really cool document. Most of the stuff in the Library is useful as reference material, so it would help in physical form to have an index at the back. Maybe some little tabs or something so you could flip quickly to the most commonly referenced pages.

Thank you in advance for responding to my well-thought-out and meaningful questions.

Adam W.

You are welcome Adam. Thank you for asking well-thought-out and meaningful questions. You can ask poorly thought out and meaningless questions too if you want; I’m not really picky about the kind of questions I answer.

Joe