Index: lines resources

[eblomquist]

Thanks that is perfect!

[cour13r5]

edited, b/c i meant to reply to @eblomquist:

also, weirdly, i don’t think the tutorials cover linking, and i totally missed the link button here (hence using html tags, haha ).

if you hit the link button:

you get this, so you can display a title, instead of the URL:

[jlmitch5]

Loving this, added a couple things.

Random question, does anyone know why the bullets in this section have more spacing, I couldn’t figure it out. It is causing me pain, hah:

[csboling]

Looks like it did this because there were a couple of newlines before the “edit this wiki” bullet. Should be fixed now.

[eblomquist]

Just wanted to express my gratitude for folks contributing to the index!

You all are rockstars

[cour13r5]

i hear what you’re saying— but it’s also easy to get caught up in the meta-classifying the entire forum.

just bouncing back to emphasize this.

i see the index as a kind of…extended onboarding in the realm of making electronic (& electronically augmented) music, which is pretty much the core of lines. not that i realized that when i stumbled onto the forum via a random google recommendation (i think it took me almost a week to figure out what the heck “a monome” was).

this index project is a perfect extension of what i’m seeing as one of the core philosophies of monome—namely, increasing accessibility in the interest of furthering innovation & (i might be making this part up, but i don’t think so) community-building/engagement.

i love all the peripheral topics (that’s how i got here), and i also think that indexing those—at least to the extent that’s happening here—would reduce the feelings of…emergence, serendipity, and discovery that contribute to the overall magic of this place.

there’s a fair bit of gamification/gameful design on discourse, and in (the best parts of) that spirit, i like the idea of allowing these peripheral gems to be rewards for further exploration of/engagement with this space.

i’m finding some of the most gonzo, weird, rewarding topics through browsing, and this experience wouldn’t be the same if it was even close to fully mapped.

[tehn]

i apologize that i didn’t fully consider the limits of this endeavor— and i’m opting to shut it down after discussion with the moderators.

first, there will be (and already is) a problem with maintaining not only the quality of information, but simply correctness. creating a collection of information is a difficult endeavor and requires a dedicated group of editors.

second, much of the information here could be just as well googled (for example, the git section) with possibly better results.

third, discourse (the forum software) is not ideally set up as a robust interconnected wiki. basically a “wiki” here is a group-edited post, which is not a entirely sufficient tool for the prospect. furthermore the forum software does have some excellent tools that may solve some of the concerns i was initially responding to:

• bookmarking: i use this myself. when i stumble across something super helpful i’d like to see in the future, it gets added to my list.
• likes: i generally hate this mechanism because it gamifies social interaction, but in our case, with this forum which is meant to be sharing technical/creative endeavors— a huge number of likes on a post can signal usefulness (or enthusiasm, which is sometimes useful). if you’re scanning through a long thread, the most-liked (see the “summarize this” function) posts will typically be the things you’re looking for.
• search: unlike previous forum software, search on here is really good .
• tags: very early on i created the llllllll tag, which has been somewhat under-utilized. i would propose that people can DM @moderators with threads they think should be included in the “best of lines” — threads which exhibit our collective energy and goals.

lastly, i believe the monome documentation is improving at rapid speed thanks to various contributors and feedback from everyone— this is what started this desire for a “generalized knowledge base” which i facilitated starting and am now going back on.

but— i’m also hoping this prompts someone (or a group of people) to start some new projects. i already came across some amazing collections of links in the blogs thread— and in fact, there’s a thread here that has a ton of information already on starting such a thing.

i apologize for my under-considered initiation of this project— please forgive me. and i’m happy to make suggestions about how to best direct some of this energy, and how to also take advantage of the existing forum functionality.

(i’ll leave this thread open for feedback for a short time, then disable the wiki and close it. of course is someone wants to migrate this preliminary collection off-site please do)

[GoneCaving]

I had some reservations about how this was progressing, so think this decision makes sense. That said,…

lastly, i believe the monome documentation is improving at rapid speed thanks to various contributors and feedback from everyone

I still think there’s a long way to go as evidenced by the questions being asked in various threads. These suggest that either the current docs are assuming too much prior knowledge, or alternatively that people are not reading them (which may well be the case). I also don’t think that the Library/Norns category and tag provides a good at-a-glance summary to the novice of what Norns is capable of to the novice user. Hopefully some summary page, or something like the “featured applications” section of the grid docs could be added.

In general, my opinion is that while discourse provides a good discussion forum, the many gems created by the community quickly become lost in the many threads, and I think that’s a shame. Some better way of preserving that for new (and old) users was one of the things that I thought the Index project might tackle. If there are better ways of doing that, I’d be interested in hearing how the
community might achieve that.

i’m happy to make suggestions about how to best direct some of this energy

This would certainly be welcomed I think.

[eblomquist]

Do you know how the list of “popular links” that is beneath the first post in many threads is populated?

That could be a good source of general learning resources, certainly topically relevant.

Thanks.

[cour13r5]

this totally makes sense & i fully respect your (& y’all’s) decision.

[tehn]

the many gems created by the community quickly become lost in the many threads, and I think that’s a shame

this is the nature of a forum. it is a flowing river. it is a platform for conversation and not very good at categorizing and sorting huge amounts of information.

yes, it is a shame that some people spend hours making detailed posts conveying information that gets buried. sometimes certain information gets repeated so often that a group of people get together and make a something like the i2c guide— which is a great example of this community’s energy.

if you see information you think is important and should be preserved or made more visible, it’s pretty simple to do— there are a variety of options:

• if it’s specific to a project that has existing open-source documentation, you can use the newfound information to improve the docs
• you could take the new knowledge and reframe if in your own words, creating a tutorial you felt helped someone else understand — ie, @neauoire rewrote his own norns studies
• you could keep a blog where you post captured snippets and highly categorize them with tags so they’re searchable by topic… ideally reworded with your own context
• (etc)

or, as i suggested in my text, you could use the like system to make these posts more visible to others (and more likely to be seen by search results and thread summaries), or just for yourself, you can bookmark them. this is all built into the forum software.

side thought: i feel like the long searchable history of the forum is actually a liability, because as time goes on threads get crowded with both noise and misinformation (ie, versions change, features change, solutions change) so stumbling on an old forum topic isn’t always a good thing. (case: i still get emails about installing monomeserial, which was deprecated over a decade ago. because information on the internet never dies.)

so: let’s keep the effort on identifying and preserving good information. the spirit and goal of this closed wiki is fundamentally unchanged— just the approach and infrastructure choice is different.

[adrianf]

Thank you for reminding me of @neauoire’s norns tutorials. I knew there was that resource somewhere, it totally slipped my mind.

[tehn]

…and just like that i’ve added it to the main docs

[neauoire]

Ah!!
It’s so nice to see the tutorial up on the documentation page