Fresher's Guide (was: [committee] Meeting today)

[David Adam]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Davyd Madeley wrote:

> So going up to 16 pages is not a good idea in your eyes? At the same
> time, I've managed to cut down the download size, and upped the fonts
> (and hopefully the readability).

Holy crap. No.

> For what it's worth, I loved my fresher's guide, all 12 pages of it.
> While already familiar with Linux, I must have read the fresher's guide
> about three times on the train home. Perhaps that's just the kind of
> person I am. I tried my hardest to recreate that level of affection for
> the '04 freshers, but apparently with little success.

Whoa.

I didn't mean to step on your fingers :-) I, also, read the Fresher's
Guide several times (mainly because I could never remember the WAIX SSH
address). I also really, really hurt my eyes (I believe I mentioned the
whole text-size thing). It eventually got lost (along with my gym locker
keys) during the Great House Move, but I also downloaded it, oh, a few
dozen times (over dialup. The download size BIT).


> Infobase has basically degenerated into a pile of crap. It's hard to
> maintain, requires knowledge of obscure DTDs (at least two of them),
> requires incredibly strict parsing, and is generally a pain.

Fine. rm -rf * and let's find something better.

> The kind of content you're talking about lends itself to content
> management via a wiki.

Sounds good. We've got a little under two months; how long does one of
these things take to install? wiki.ucc.asn.au, here we come.

> If we had a good online reference, then sure, 4 pages would be fine.
> However at the moment we suffer from a lack of documentation and a good
> method to get it online. Meaning the only way you can be softly led into
> these things is through a massive fresher's guide. There is an
> incredible amount of information to digest, more then we can even fit
> into 16 pages.

As I think I've kind of said above: let's get a better online reference.
We're a *computer club*. And yet our primary documentation method is offline.
While that has its place (in things like, oh, restoring filesystems with
vi and a toothpick), it would be far cooler if it was online and
up-to-date. Now that I'm aware the Infobase suxtehw4ng, I'm just going to
go with the wiki idea.

> > guide, but not the website. Let's move it. I would also like to see photos
> > of at least the committee, perhaps some of wheel@, door@ and coke at .
>
> This was suggested a while ago, but nothing ever came of it. I propose
> someone with a digital camera lend it to the club for a few days for
> some photography, door members, wheel members, committee and machines.

Yep, you can borrow mine (maybe at the Cameron Hall reopening or
something).

OK, as for the big list of things which I said needed to go on the web
site:

> > * Dispense documentation
... <snip> ...
>
> The fresher's guide currently contains a much better explanation of this
> then the '04 one. I apologise for last year's not being well thought
> out.

I know all this information was around. My point was that it shouldn't be
in the Fresher's Guide. I have ideological and practical issues with this
sort of thing being PDFed, rather than HTMLed. It's information that is
subject to change (dispense is a case in point). Remember, anyone can
always just print out a web page. Only Acrobat and Google read PDFs with
any real success.

> The best way to become a webmaster is to ask ;)

But with great power comes great responsibility. And you can retrofit that
to small amounts of power. (For the record, being a webmaster for one
student society is quite enough, thank you.)

---

Now, at this stage, when we stop talking about the Fresher's Guide and
move on to other things, I should probably re-state my original
intentions.

I'm not actually saying "The 2004 Fresher's Guide was crap and unreadable,
I hated UCC because of it, and Davyd stinks." - but I do think it's time
for a change.

Here's the bottom line, IMO.

This is an opportunity to change things for the better. If we leave a
gargantuan Fresher's Guide and a busted web site, what are the chances it
will change?

I believe that, by reducing the Fresher's Guide to a document that is
merely a starting point, a document that fulfills the whole idea of the
UCC by *getting people on to computers and learning something*, and at the
same time making our online documentation more comprehensive and easier to
access and alter, we will be doing not only the incoming first-years, but
ourselves, a tremendous service.

I do not belive that we can do this "one part at a time". If there is no
incentive to get information online - that is, the thought that "if I
don't write this page, tides of first-years are going to be asking me how
to get MP3s off the network" - it will not happen. If we reduce the
Fresher's Guide without writing the additional material, then tides of
first-years... well, you get the point.

I also am slightly worried that I'm taking something that is so trivial in
the galatic scheme of things so seriously :-) My apologies to those of you
who really, honestly couldn't care less.

----

> Excellent. This is a great day in the sun, signing up freshers and
> taking their money.

Plus, there are a few people who I need to lasso.

> > Aside from leading a crusade to get the guild to change that irritating
> > abbreviation for orientation day, what else needs to be done? I can't
> > really remember this year's stall, the whole day was a bit of a blur
> > (mainly thanks to a dodgy sausage from the Med tent).
>
> But it's not orientation day. Orientation day is called Host day, O'day
> is the campus-wide party ;)

So therefore O'day is an even more retarded name than I had ever imagined.
Fantastic. Still, at least our Guild isn't run by criminals.

> Perhaps we should ask tech what they think about content management
> systems.

I see you have beaten me to the punch.

Right. It's far too late, and I have written far too many words today.

Cheers,

David Adam
zanchey@