Documents in the VAO

We now lots of different ways that a document can be published in the VAO: the wiki, forum, blog, JIRA issue, mailing lists, public website or the document repository.  This post suggests how these elements might work together.

The wiki (including Trac) serves as the internal web site.  It provides an easy way to publish and organize information that we want to use in running the VAO.  Though there may be exceptions, information here is generally not visible to the public.  Limited effort are made to enforce style guidelines.  Obsolete information is deleted (though available through the internal CM capabilities of the wiki).  Organization is according to the functional needs of the VAO, notably through WBS elements and software development projects.

The document repository is intended to provide a standard location for finding all formal documentation in the VAO.  Any document that have a version number (and some that don't) should be available in the repository. All versions of a document re available.     My recollection is that the current plan is to have the repository basically be a wiki page with lots of attachments, but I may be out of date.  If this is still the approach the documents in the repository would be an exception to the visibility rules for the wiki since they would be visible to the public.

The forum provides an area where questions and comments may be asked and discussed.  The post initiating a forum discussion may require a fairly long prologue setting up a context or giving some background information, but an archetypical post would boil down to a fairly short question or comment:  "How do I get the list of sources I extracted from the portal into the  cross-correlation engine?"  "Wouldn't it be nice if I could see the positions in galactic coordinates?"  "The SED service crashes on my Linux xxx box."

A JIRA ticket implicitly describes both a situation and a resolution.  A ticket is the appropriate document to initiate and monitor a specific action by the VAO team.   If no specific action is intended then a JIRA ticket is not the appropriate vehicle.

Mailing lists are the only documentation framework outside JIRA which demands attention from the user.  Thus they are used to make sure that people are informed when meetings are to take place or when critical documents are to be reviewed.  Generally other formats are better for structured discussion of issues, especially the Wiki and forums.

The web site is what we present to our science and EPO communities.  The web site may reference the document repository for documentation of some user services but probably does not have much visibility into the other documentation classes discussed here.   Ray has suggested that we might use Trac pages for software documentation.  Personally I'm a little dubious here.  Good documentation for a service as seen by users is rather different from that for developers.  I also think that it's important that documentation look like it belongs to the service its documenting.  Typically a web page will use lots of internal anchors and such.  So my suspicion is that on-line documentation will tend to be either complete documents from the repository or specially crafted using the overall web site guidelines for the VAO.

Finally the blog is used for essays: what does a member or team from the VAO think about something.  The blog can be documentation but tends to be developmental rather than descriptive.   E.g., suppose the portal effort goes off and tries a couple of different techniques for coupling to the cross-correlation service.  SAMP for some reason doesn't work and a VOSpace-based approach is adopted.   A blog entry describing this process could be invaluable.  It doesn't really belong in the documentation of the service as developed, but a blog post provides a place to say why a given approach was adopted.  Similarly the blog can be used to talk at length about how we might do something complex (say mesh our various documentation frameworks to pick a random one:) in a non-authoritative way.

To give a concrete example of how all of these might work together consider the current  discussion of how we will build web pages.  I tried to kick off the discussion with a blog post trying to summarize what we think we agree on and what questions need to be addressed.  Other's are free to comment on or edit the post.  If they have some substantial thoughts themselves, a parallel post can be provided.  If we've more than a trickle we'll want to add tags to discussions to group them.  Over the course of the next month, as we begin to understand the boundaries of what we are trying to do, we may start a wiki page with an outline for the policy document.  A post to the team mailing list lets everyone know what's happening so this can be reviewed by and edited by the team and a version can be agreed upon.  At that point the document should be copied in some fashion, TBD, to the document repository.  It may require purchase of specific software by one or more members of the VAO and a JIRA ticket can be issued for each such requirement.  This discussion manifestly affects the appearance of the public web pages we have, but no reference to it is necessarily visible in those pages.  Once the process begins a VAO member with a question about how to do a specific step in the documentation process may enter a query in the forum (especially if we have an inward facing version of the forum) and other members of the team can respond with suggestions.