Webcraft Get Started Guide Book Sprint


Project Submitted! Hoorray!

Name *
Pippa Buchanan    
 
Email *
Pippa.buchanan@gmail.com
 
Are you applying for the Doc Sprint on your own behalf or on behalf of an organization? *
 
If you are applying on behalf of an organization, what is that organization's name? 
School of Webcraft, P2PU and Mozilla Foundation
I'm applying as an unfunded community member of School of Webcraft
Please describe the topic area you'd like to do a book sprint in. *e.g. APIs, databases, geo, etc.
eg. Get started guide for web developers: The things everyone needs to learn and never should forget.
 
Who else would you like to recommend to attend the book sprint? Please list names and emails: 

What is your  doc sprint proposal?  *Please be detailed about why you  or your org  would like to participate, who will come if you participate,  what you hope to get out of the sprint, and how it will help you or  your org.

I propose a "Get Started" book for web developers: supporting both those with professional goals and learners who wish to develop as a hobby or part of their existing career (eg. teachers). The focus would be explaining the principles and motivations behind best practice for HTML, CSS and Javascript.

There are many resources  available for web developers, however it is difficult for beginners to  identify which content is reliable and up to date. Most  quality beginners' resources are held under copyright, are limited to English and require payment: this makes it difficult for global audiences to access quality information about how to start making web sites.  

There are however many excellent, free reference materials (W3C standards [http://www.w3.org/standards/], Mozilla Developers Centre https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/] and educational tools such as the Opera / W3C Web Standards Curriculum [http://www.w3.org/wiki/Web_Standards_Curriculum] and  WaSPs Interact Curriculum Web Design 1 [http://interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/front-end-development/web-design-1?modules]. However the instructional, guiding voice that sits between these spaces (curriculum and reference) is not freely available in a quality format or in the respected format of a book.  

The use of Booki, the FLOSS Manuals project and the Book Sprint methodology offers many benefits beyond rapid, collaborative textbook development. We can easily maintain the resource and output to multiple formats including the web, electronic and printed books. It is this flexibility of formats which is very exciting, particularly as many learners may feel more secure learning from a book. The traditional format of books offer many benefits, such as findability on services such as Amazon, and serving audiences in the South, where web development is a desired skill, but web access itself may be difficult. 

Over the past years I've worked as a web developer, taught web development basics and helped build the School of Webcraft community. In all these contexts I've been frustrated by the lack of a respected, freely available textbook that can be easily updated and distributed to non-English audiences. Effective support for School of Webcraft audiences has been challenging as course organisers need to direct learners to free and openly licensed content. Scaling the project to support non-English audiences has been even more difficult as it is even harder to direct them to free, quality resources in their language. 

Producing this document will have immediate benefits for learners within the School of Webcraft project community, however the intended audience of this book will be much greater as it should be usable by those learning web development independently and in formal learning contexts.

We recognise that docsprint time is too limited to create a highly polished textbook, however by the end of the sprint we hope to have a high quality draft which can be used immediately and reviewed by School of Webcraft participants.  Moving  on from this intial draft it is expected that further refinements such as developing a case study for learners to work through and sample question and answer exercises could be added.  QR Code links directing readers to related video content and tutorials are also envisioned as a useful addition to the textbook.

Following this initial book sprint we propose that a regular release cycle (eg. twice yearly) and further docsprints be established to regularly update any improvements and to support translation efforts by volunteer localisers. This regular update cycle is required to reflect changes to the HTML standards and the frequent releases of modern browsers. 

This docsprint will provide valuable collaborative learning, educational development and technical writing experience to all participants regardless of their experience level.  The proposal maker will use this experience to learn more about the BookSprint facilitation methodology. These facilitation skills will be used for the purposes of maintaining the proposed resource and developing other learning resources in a similar manner. 

If this proposal is successful, we would invite members of the School of Webcraft community, recognised web educators and writers, and Mozilla contributors to participate in the development of the text. Chris Mills (Opera) and Chris Heilmann (Mozilla) are unable to participate at the time of the book sprint however, both are suppportive of this proposal and are happy to help in any way they can. We would also appreciate suggestions of any Google representatives or Summer of Code participants who'd be interested in being part of both the core sprint team and the longer running contributor community. 

This proposal is being made with the support of the School of Webcraft community, however Pippa Buchanan and the proposed participants are not able to receive any confirmed funding for travel as part of the docsprint and unconference. We would appreciate the assistance of Google Summer of Code in supporting participant travel where required. 







********************
 
 



NOTE: Initial framing of the Doc sprint is as a proposal for a Google Summer of Code unconference and Book Sprint series. There is a long term need for this - would be good to work out how to implement this even if not successful for GSoC (part of Drumbeat festival?)
https://sites.google.com/site/docsprintsummit/home

http://en.flossmanuals.net/ <= previous floss manuals
http://www.booki.cc/ <= software tool used for booksprints
http://www.booksprints.net/ <= facilitation methodology

School of Webcraft is changing. We're maintaining our community driven courses and study groups but we're adding a new focus: creating really useful learning experiences for people learning web development. 

There are two focusses: the user experience of the P2PU site that School of Webcraft operates in and the development of "Web Challenges" the learning content and badges for an initial Webmaking 101 course.

Providing an openly licensed and improvable "textbook"  to support the Webmaking 101 course will be extremely useful. However providing a high-quality, free, Mozilla (and Google) backed old-fashioned paper book wil be useful beyond the School of Webcraft context.



PROs:
Can be maintained and released in versions. Available as PDF, ePub, Kindle etc
Translateable and re-releasable.

Proposed Audience

Think of a Venn diagram made up of the intersection of people with aspirations to become professional web developers and those who want to learn web development to assist with their existing career or some other part of their life (eg. teachers, teenagers, scientists, cat fanciers, your mum)


 
What  is your doc sprint proposal?  *Please be detailed about why you  or  your org would like to participate, who will come if you participate,   what you hope to get out of the sprint, and how it will help you or   your org.

-------------------------



Over the past years I've worked as a web developer, taught web development basics and 


Arran's content ideas: 
----------------------------
intro
Structure of the web
        sep of content, structure, stye & interaction
what is the web vs internet
        is your content web or internet
web is not just on the desktop, things to think about when planning design/content/code for a broader web

browsers be broken
        ideas around testing
        common bugs 
        stupid code you write for stupid browsers

semantic html (its really pretty to non desktop browsers)
lets help out those other people with a bit of styling
------------------------

some other stuff

------------------------
later stage of the book look at different styles of writing code
depending on;
coding for change, coding to large work force, coding for speed, coding for accessibility and coding for optimisation
----------------------------


Chris Mills' comments:

Overall, this sounds like a good plan - I think what's been written hangs together well as a proposal. Only two comments at this stage:

1. near the top you say this "Over the past years I've worked as a web developer, taught web development basics and helped build the School of Webcraft learning community. In all of these contexts I've been frustrated by the lack of a respected, freely available text book resource that can be easily maintained by its users and distributed to non-English audiences" - I know translations have not been as forthcoming as we'd like for the Opera WSC, but why wouldn't it suit your needs as a freely available, quality resource that you can direct learners to? This was the whole point.

Oh, i've directed users to it - over and over again - they don't seem to pay attention (to me).

ok ;-)
 There's also something magical about a book that gives many learners a bit more safety
 
 Yup, I think you are right there.

2.  when creating the book spec, you need ot make sure that the scope is really tightly focused, as there is so much to potentially cover, and you need ot keep it down to a magaeable page count. Otherwise again, it will overface people and you might as well give them the WSC ;-)

I think you need to keep the history and W3C type stuff down to a minimum, and not bother too much with the esoteric stuff like IA/UX/a11y. Just stick to the magic trio of technologies.

How on earth is a11y ever esoteric? :P Mols

exactly :-)

how about a focus on why each of the modules within WaSP Web standards one is important?
http://interact.webstandards.org/curriculum/front-end-development/web-design-1?modules

The why you need to know it bit - we can refer to WSC, MDN etc for the more technical elements. 

Sounds like a good idea - perhaps use a case study running through the book that readers can keep adding to as they go along? At each stage, explain why this bit or that bit is important, then give the reader the basic syntax, and tell them what resources to go and read to learn more about it...then tell them to add a new feature to the case study

I think this is an excellent idea, and adds a "hack" inspired methodology. MH

Provide solutions online for them to check their answers against.

This way you could cut down on page count.

I also thought we could add in QR codes & links pointing to video content that's relevant

nice idea - that would give you a lot of mileage for a cool interactive design. You don't see many books like that at present, and it would turn heads.

Some general feedback, I'd like to see the W3C represented more prominently. Part of my job there is to help bridge the "ivory tower" to the "web workers of the world" - the WSC/W3C that Chris is working on is brilliant and totally appropriate here, however, I'd like a little standalone commentary. Essentially, this is the issue: The W3C was never defined as an educational or outreach body, and this has led to a disconnect between the specifications, tools and how we actually work. It's been very implementor-centric, but several groups are working hard to change that and bring sychronous language to specs. An example might be calling a gutter a gutter in CSS instead of a gap. That sort of consistency is deeply lacking at W3C itself, confusing all things that extend from it. A book of this nature can act very strongly as a bridge between those worlds. The results are more developers end up on W3C groups, lending a real-world sensibility, and the W3C groups are being pried open from their strong process-oriented bent into a more crowd-sourced, interactive model. 

Revolution brings evolution, kids! 

This is an awesome project btw, and thank you for including me. I'm truly honored.