Intersect Documentation

Thoughts on Intersect Members Based Organization documentation.

Intersect

In our experience (QADAO) of documentation of many projects in Catalyst some clarity on what we are trying to achieve would be necessary before choosing a documentation platform.

• Discord is useful for informal discussion. But content quickly gets lost and can disappear completely as there is no easy backup solution per channel or thread. Same with tools like Telegram.

• A traditional WIKI like MediaWiki (what Wikipedia runs on) is too open to unstructured edits - so requires a heavy Admin overhead. Unless tools like Semantic Mediawiki are used (but this is under supported).

• the most mainstream and extensive forum platform is https://www.discourse.org/ (as currently used by the Cardano Foundation for the Cardano Forum). This supports structured categories, nested threads etc. But this comes at a cost.

• GitHub is the platform for technical discussion in the context of pull requests and can be used for governance discussions (as evidenced by CIP-1694) and is open source. But this platform presents a high barrier of entry to most users.

• GitBook tends to be the choice for end documentation and useful for communicating end results and archiving.

So a likely choice for capturing forum discussions on a well known platform already in use by Cardano would be Discourse.

Next we need to work out what we are trying to achieve here. As jamesdunseith has pointed out elsewhere on this server - what is the scope of our discussions and what is our baseline ?

• Is it general discussion and ideation around directed subjects ?

• Is it an attempt to draft technical proposals or governance standards ?

If an experimental context is to be taken seriously then a baseline would be the first step. That is, discrete governance subjects that are scoped by a Voltaire context (such as CIP-1694). If co-production is to happen this needs to start at the beginning. It starts with community agreement and buy in on scope. This approach implies facilitation and outreach if it is serious about avoiding being a clique or closed shop.

Finally tooling is just a mechanism of governance not it's raison d'etre. An answer to question "what are we building this for ?" is needed. That requires a culture and a community based on trust and engagement. That is where community facilitators and builders like WADA, gimbalabs, Swarm and ODIN can contribute.