A Call for Documentation Help

ASL Community,

We need your help!

As the leadership announced a few weeks ago, we are looking for beta testers and maybe even some development help. That’s one key way to contribute, although response has been disappointingly light.

However if beta testing isn’t your thing, there’s another great way you can contribute - by writing documentation! The long-term goal is to consolidate all AllStarLink documentation into the ASL Manual. This includes updating and replacing the content on wiki.allstarlink.org as well was going through some of the excellent help that’s been provided here.

The ability to edit and contribute to the documentation does not require any significant technological skill and can be done on any common OS - Windows, MacOS, or Linux. All that’s needed is to:

  1. Install VSCode (or another editor of your choice), Git, Python3, and MKDocs
  2. Create a GitHub account (if you don’t have one)
  3. Learn some VERY basic use of Git and GitHub
  4. Contribute!

If you can write a post in the Community, you can contribute documentation to AllStarLink. In fact, the ASL Community forum and the ASL Manual both use a very simple text styling format named Markdown. This format is far simpler than HTML or even the Mediawiki page language. Spending 30 minutes doing the tutorial will prepare just about anyone to contribute.

There is a long todo list of good first issues for people wanting to contribute. The ASL Developers will help out with any questions on getting started, using git, etc. We’re working to improve the documentation on how to improve the documentation too!!

See the ASL3 Manual README.md for more info

Contributing some documentation is not a lot of invested time, but it’s an invaluable contribution to the AllStarLink community.

If you are interested, please contact myself or WA3WCO.

Thanks,
Jason N8EI

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