TUT91546 OpenDOC Automating Documentation
This Tutorial session was delivered at SUSECON in November 2016, in Washington, DC.
Abstract: In this session we will suggest a new approach to documentation, breaking the perception that a rolling release cannot be documented. Forums, mailing lists, wikis, release notes, Git commit comments, QA tools like Open QA or the SUSE Build Service and many more sources deliver an abundance of resources that offer indicators for documentation. However the data is neither collected nor structured nor viewed at all, mostly because everybody thinks it's a tedious work. But modern knowledge management tools can collect the data, analyze and structure it, add semantics and put it into a format that a community, a company or an OSS corporation can benefit from - receiving a usable basis for further work with minimal human input.
Imagine a website like Stackoverflow or Reddit (but open source and company-independent) with automated input, but ranked by interest (views), helpfulness and discussion thread length. The input triggers could become an open project, like Open QA's tests. A "Doc Gardener" could then pick up the most important tasks and move them to openSUSE wiki or Enterprise Documentation, at the same time helping the community and spotting pain points of the community.