Habari Party 2009

11:00am

Took me a while to get connected and running, and clean up the mess from the road e-mails, but now I'm going to try to live blog our sessions. Enjoy.

We're discussing documentation and how we can improve it. One suggestion was building documentation before code. Write the documentation as to how a feature should work and then build the code to match the docs.

We're also discussing the wiki and how we can improve it. Completing the namespace setup is a big step to make the information easy to find will help.

11:07

We've done a little hardware hacking to bridge the seam in the whiteboard with some toilet paper and stickers from apples. It's pretty successful. We're currently discussing how to get people to do some of the "dull" work in terms of documentation. One example is the "quests" on thesixtyone.com.

11:21

We're now discussing how we can reward community involvement using something fun like badges/points/icons or something. Examples include iconbuffet and stack overflow. The problems identified include the fact that those site have a single venue to track participation, whereas we have many.

11:30

Now we're discussing plugin/theme directory and things like one-click downloading/upgrading how to make it both easy and safe.

11:35

Owen is describing out the "Area" feature (part of the taxonomy system) works in themes, using his site that uses areas as an example.

11:55

Owen is now explaining the taxonomy system and how it works, and why.

12:07

Getting ready for lunch and discussing what's in store for after lunch, as well as recapping what we've covered this morning.