[Bf-education] Blender Reference

[Pep Ribal]

Hi all,

I haven't posted anything yet, because I feel that my vision on all this 
might be a bit off of what it seems to be the way of action you all are 
pointing out. However I feel that I must share my ideas. Actually I 
wasn't unsure if I had to post it or in bf-docboard... However if you 
think I also should post in the docboard list, tell me and I will do it too.

Last 2 days I've been having interesting conversations in the IRC (with 
darKoram and greylica), and I think I should share my thoughts with the 
rest of you.

The thing began 2 months ago. I've been thinking on becoming BFCT for a 
while, and finally I decided to go for it. However I find that the major 
problem for someone that wants to learn Blender in depth is the lack of 
an in-depth up-to-date Blender reference. The wiki can definitely be a 
good place to give you good hints, but I think it's far away from being 
a complete reference site... To make things "worse", development goes so 
fast that documentation gets outdated easily.

I contributed in a few places in the wiki manual (and years ago I worked 
on the manual translation to spanish), but I think that it is currently 
not the resource (at least) I need.

So I boldly decided to create my own Blender reference. My idea is to 
make a "dissection" of Blender, trying and testing every bit and piece 
of it, and to slowly create a brief reference (in Spanish at the moment) 
documents for myself which I could use in the future to make video 
tutorials, lectures and so on. I think that such a reference would be 
the perfect basis for: official manual, tutorials and video tutorials, 
examinations, courses, and a long etcetera.

So these 2 months I've been "touching everything" in Blender in all the 
possible ways and forms. Result has been I start to learn a lot; at the 
same time I've done a lot of bug reporting (as I push Blender in all 
ways, and I find many little things), but it's hard, as ther is not a 
source of complete knowledge about all Blender features.

The problem: it's very sluggish. That is Herculean task for a single 
person. However, I'm decided to continue no matter how long it takes. 
And it's gonna take me ages.

With my recent conversations on the IRC, I would like to know if perhaps 
my personal project could be integrated into the Blender community. My 
goal atm is not certification, or exams, or whatever. I'm thinking on 
the long run: I am for a complete in-depth up-to-date Blender reference. 
Either made by me, or rather turned into an official project. Then, I 
can start thinking again on my BFCT, because I will have good material.

If it worked ok, developers could even forget about documenting, except 
for a) the release logs and b) the weekly meetings.

As I took a master certificate on project management time ago, I'm very 
aware that in every project planning is more than 50%. If a good project 
charter and plan could be designed (with all key elements of project 
planning or similar), and if enough people could commit, I would 
definitely change the approach from a personal project to a community one.

The plan should integrate: writers, reference breakdown and assignments, 
regular meetings with the developers (let's say once a week?), 
schedules, definite milestones, resource management, scope, and so on.

Regarding meetings with coders, I've been bothering them a bit those 
past days, but I think that "official" meetings would give writers much 
more confidence that their questions will be answered "this week".

I think I've written too much. Well, I don't know if someone will think 
I'm saying a single interesting word, but at least I could share my 
thoughts. Let me know what you think.

Best,

Pep.