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5. www.OpenMI.org and wiki.OpenMI.org
5.1 Review the getting started pages on the wiki
We have already put enormous efforts into documenting the OpenMI standard and the SDK. By the end of the HarmonIt project we wrote hundreds of page in the formal documentation (the Book A -F stuff), and more recently we have work especially on the wiki to improve the documentation in order to facilitate people new to OpenMI (the HowTo pages). So even though we are well above the typical documentation level for research projects, we still need to improve. I think that improving documentation and guidelines will be the area where we achieve most effect in order to get OpenMI used around the world. Naturally we still need to develop new features, but should not sacrifice documentation. I believe that the getting started pages on the wiki is currently be best entry for new people and I will typically direct such people to these pages. I would appreciate if we could spend a little time going through the getting started pages and assign task for improvements. Specifically, I have noticed that after the upgrade of the wiki sofware some pages have been corrupted.
David Maidment recently wrote in a mail to Roger. "I think the OpenMI conceptual model is presently contained in Appendix G or somewhere else near the end of your large manual. I wonder if this model could be restated in a separate document so that reviewers of it don't have to extract the key points out of a huge software engineering manual. I am thinking of something that could be read and understood by your hydrologic science colleagues at CHE, the scientists in our ChyMP group, etc.". Most likely he did not know about the wiki, which make me think if the wiki exposed sufficiently on the official openmi web,
(Jan)
5.2 Could we simply use a wiki for the official OpenMI web site
Currently the official OpenMI is exposed on three different web sites www.OpenMI.org, wiki.OpenMI.org and http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmi
. There are naturally good reasons for running these three web sites. www.OpenMI.org is the very official nicely formatted quality assured stuff, whereas the wiki is more quick and dirty, and finally sourceforge provides tools for version control, task and bug trackers, and help forum. It is my impression that people, in their search for information about OpenMI may get confused, also I sometimes have doubts about whether I should direct people towards the wiki or www.openmi.org. Maintenance of thee web sites is time consuming, and since we do not know how much funding we will have when the Life project ends, we need to go for agile solutions. I discussed these issues with Michiel Blind some month ago and we agreed it should be investigated if we simply could use a wiki for the official web site. There are examples of very nicely formatted wikis around (see e.g.). In my opinion largest advantage of switching to a wiki, it the ability for a large group to easily edit the text on the wiki - so we get the nice stuff out there quickly. So, what is the OATC opinion about this? Can we recommend specific wiki software? Would it be possible to spend some time setting something up, that will demonstrate how is could look? Jan Gregersen
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