Rethinking Ed-Fi Technical Documentation and News
The Ed-Fi tech team has produced a lot of content over the years. Yet, we continue to face challenges with our documentation. On the one hand, discoverability and awareness seem to be low; on the other, our technical processes for managing the content are at odds with our typical daily workflows.
The impact is evident, though as yet unquantified. We see it daily in the questions asked on Slack and in our community success case load. At times, even the content creators are confused and unable to find the content they were looking for. And, we hear it directly from our friends in the community, at events like Tech Congress and in governance meetings. We see that:
- Awareness of new releases is low.
- Awareness of product roadmaps and changes in support is low.
- People easily land on outdated information without realizing it, referring to prior versions.
- New folks don't know where to get started.
- There is no place for less formal writing (like this article), given that we don't want to fill the www.ed-fi.org blog with deep technical content.
The recent move of Ed-Fi Tech Docs to Confluence Cloud further exposed these problems, and might have even exacerbated some of them.
This new space is an experiment, to see how we might radically shake things up.
It starts with this "developer blog" and a few light-weight permanent pages about the Ed-Fi Data Exchange Standards and Ed-Fi Technology Suite. We'll add a simple tutorial. In coming months we'll create a mechanism for opt-in email notification of blog posts and roadmap announcements.
We'd love to have your feedback. Drop a line to techsupport@ed-fi.org or you can send me or another tech team member a direct message in Slack.