We will submit a talk proposal to both SXSW Edu, and SXSWi. The target audiences are different, and this is reflected by the talk proposals. In general, our goals are to:
- promote WPD
- promote collaborative documentation
- ask people to help us
- tell the world what WPD is, and why we created it
- what problems does it aim to solve?
SXSW Edu talk proposal
Janet's comment: For SXSWedu, the goal would be to promote awareness and participation among educators, by emphasizing how the site can help them to teach and to create reusable teaching materials.
Title
webplatform.org: learn and teach the web (not the best title in the world, but you are limited to 50 characters)
Presentation format
Solo or Dual presentation. (there are lots of us, so doing it as a panel is tempting, but I think panels tend to suffer from fragmentation and loss of cohesive message. If we wanted to do a panel, we'd have to think very carefully about it.)
Difficulty level
Intermediate
Tags
documentation, community building, web development (you are only allowed three)
Category
Gaming, Learning and development (not great, but this seems to be the most appropriate of the options given)
Intended audience
Educators that teach web-related subjects, web developers and designers who wish to brush up their skills, students wishing to learn web-related subjects
In 1000 characters or less, describe your panel idea to us
The web industry is one of the fastest-growing industries; even in times of recession, everyone wants a web presence, because it is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to market yourself and find customers, friends, and more. But in spite of this, the web industry suffers from a shortage of new people with the skills required to do the job well. Very few web-related courses do a great job of teaching modern web design, so many people teach themselves. For self learners, finding reliable, good quality learning and reference material is difficult, as there is so much available out there.
To improve things, the W3C got together with a number of other companies and decided to to produce the ultimate, definitive, community-powered documentation resource to provide all the tutorials, references and other materials a teacher could need to teach an effective web-related course. This talk will center around what webplatform.org contains, and how teachers can use it to create reusable teaching materials and deliver better courses.
Students wishing to learn web-related subjects might also be interested in seeing what webplatform.org has to offer.
List three questions that this talk will answer
- What resources does webplatform contain?
- How can developers, designers, students, and teachers use, reuse, and add to the site and the content?
- How can an educator use webplatform.org to teach a more effective course?
SXSWi talk proposal
Janet's comment: For SXSWi, that audience likes to feel like part of the elite (and to be fair, I guess they are); in addition to talking about how the site can help them do their jobs, we can give them a "backstage tour" of the technical and organizational challenges we've addressed in creating the site.
Title
webplatform.org: documenting web development (not the best title in the world, but you are limited to 50 characters)
Presentation format
Solo or Dual presentation. (there are lots of us, so doing it as a panel is tempting, but I think panels tend to suffer from fragmentation and loss of cohesive message. If we wanted to do a panel, we'd have to think very carefully about it.)
Difficulty level
Beginner to advanced
Tags
documentation, community building, web development (you are only allowed three)
Category
Resources/education
Intended audience
Web developers and designers of all levels
In 1000 characters or less, describe your panel idea to us
We all want to improve our skills and learn more, whether we are grizzled veterans or aspiring newcomers to the web industry. But sometimes sourcing resources to help us find what we need to know can be difficult. There are many high quality resources out there, but many of them are biased, out of date, in-complete, or all of the above. It is hard for all the resource owners to keep their resources current, with all the new advancements in web technologies.
To improve things, the W3C decided to collaborate with a number of other companies such as Google, Mozilla, Opera, Facebook and Microsoft — many of whom already have their own documentation and other resources — to produce the ultimate, definitive, community-powered documentation resource for web design and development.
This resource is called webplatform.org — in this talk we will talk about how the site can help you do your jobs and learn more, give you a backstage tour of the technical and organisational challenges we've addressed in creating the site, and show you how you can contribute to the content base as part of the web platform.org community!
List seven questions that this talk will answer
- How has this project been funded and created, in cooperation between several often competing companies?
- How was the site built, and what were the surrounding technical issues we addressed?
- How does this project improve on existing documentation resources?
- How can a successful community can be used to create a lot of documentation?
- How are contributions from already existing resources handled, in terms of licensing, porting, etc.?
- How will this resource help web developers and designers to do their job?
- What is the future for webplatform.org?