[asterisk-users] RFC -- Improving the quality of the mailing lists

[Jared Smith]

On Tue, 2009-01-27 at 10:13 -0700, Robert Broyles wrote:
> I'm still pretty new to the mailing lists myself. I don't consider
> myself a novice Asterisk user, but one of my biggest 'complaints' is
> the lack of a well documented FAQ or Manual for Asterisk. 

Asterisk is truly an open-source community, and that pertains to
documentation as well.  The quality and quantity of the documentation
depends heavily on contribution from the community at large.  Digium has
and will continue to put resources towards Asterisk documentation, but
every contribution from the community at large helps.

> (Unless one is willing to buy or read O'Reilly's Book -
> http://www.asteriskdocs.org - which quickly will be outdated again.)  

Alas, you've mentioned the one thing that both makes me happy and sad at
the same time.  Happy that people find it useful, and that O'Reilly was
kind enough to let us publish it under a Creative Commons license (and
put the PDF on the web for free!)... and sad that it takes so much time
and effort to keep up to date.  (And just for the record, the time that
the other authors and I spend on writing the O'Reilly book is our own
personal time -- I'm not working on it during company time!)

> I have made it a personal aim to document all my findings in a blog,
> so that it's at least searchable by others through Google, in hopes
> that others might find it useful.
> 
> But if we had a REGULARLY updated FAQ/Manual ... I think that would
> greatly cut down on the clutter posts. 

If you're interested and serious about writing, join the asterisk-docs
mailing list and let's try to get something started.  I've been beating
the documentation drum for almost seven years now, and I'd love to see
the -docs mailing list come back to life.


-- 
Jared Smith
Digium, Inc. | Training Manager