[ckan-discuss] Overhauling CKAN documentation: call for participation

Mon Feb 15 21:49:40 GMT 2010

Dear all,

Rufus, great and important step. Antti thanks for the ideas for screen casts. 

I have some experiences producing screen casts on mac. There are a lot of tool out there for all os. I use "screenflow": http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/overview.htm 

I agree with Jonathan that the first and most important thing to start with is a storyboard. At my work we follow these steps to produce a screen cast:

1. first storyboard draft
2. first screen cast
3. revision of storyboard
4. re-editing or second srceen cast

The clearer the initial idea / concept of "what you want to say" the quicker and the better the result.    

As a result you would want to have something like this:
"A video with the best quality for the smallest file size" 

I would actually volunteer to produce screen casts for ckan, but I would be happy if we first cooperatively produce the storyboard together. 

Here is a good starting point: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Screencast
And here is a template for the the storyboard: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/5/5a/Screencast_storyboard.odt

How jumps in? I actually imagine we could also produce screencasts for opendefinition :)

Greetings
Daniel

Technically you would want a result exported in theora, mp4, avi, mov or flv like this:

Codec:			H.264/AAC
Size:			800x600 Pixel
Audio:			22,05	kHz Mono mp3
Frame rate:		25	    fps
Audio bit rate:	64	    kbps
Total bit rate:		448     kbps

Or theora (free)
Codec:			theora/ogg
Size:			800x600 Pixel
Audio: 			22,05	kHz Mono mp3
Frame rate: 		25	    fps
Audio bit rate:	64	    kbps
Total bit rate: 	448     kbps

About Video Formats and Codecs:
FLV		http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video
H.264	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
Theora 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora

On 15.02.2010, at 17:52, Jonathan Gray wrote:

> Good call Antti!
> 
> Guess first step for these would be to put together a transcript. Has
> anyone done screencasts before? Know any good software to do this with
> (esp. on Linux)?
> 
> Jonathan
> 
> On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Antti Poikola <antti.poikola at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Screencast videodocumentations are good
>> 
>> 1. Intro video what is CKAN for whom and why 3 minutes
>> 2. Registering video 1 minute
>> 3. Adding new data set 2 minutes
>> 4. Modifying existing dataset 1 minute
>> 5. Bulkupload and other advanced features 5-10 minutes
>> 
>> -Jogi
>> 
>> Rufus Pollock wrote:
>>> 
>>> A major overhaul/improvement of the CKAN documentation is planned and
>>> this is a call for help! Main thing to emphasize is planned division
>>> between:
>>> 
>>>  * User docs/manual - for end users of a CKAN installation
>>>  * Developer/Coder docs - CKAN code (plus API) plus sysadmin (INSTALL etc)
>>> 
>>> Focus of CFP is the user manual. I've put an overview and plan here:
>>> <http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/doc/> Comments very welcome. Main
>>> take-aways:
>>> 
>>> * User docs: help wanted -- please add yourself to the wiki page if
>>> you are interested in helping out
>>>  * User docs will be located somewhere we can all collaborate so I
>>> suggest using the wiki: <http://wiki.okfn.org/ckan/doc/>
>>> 
>>> * Dev docs: need to live close to code so best place is probably in
>>> mercurial repo at /doc/ - will be done mainly by developers
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> 
>>> Rufus
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> ckan-discuss mailing list
>>> ckan-discuss at lists.okfn.org
>>> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/ckan-discuss
>>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Gray
> 
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
> 
> Twitter/Identica: jwyg
> 
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