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@jonnor
Last active August 29, 2015 14:06
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Documentation is futile

Documentation is futile, make machines do it

Workshop proposal for http://makercon.no

Fablabs, maker- and hackerspaces across the world all stuggle with a common problem: documentation. Projects made are consistently underdocumented, often missing one or more critical piece of information needed to understand, use and reproduce the project.

Current approaches to this problem are usually centered around setting up content management systems which make it 'easy' for users to upload & publish documentation, along with policies/guidelines for what to document and how. None seem to tackle the seemingly fundamental problem: that manually creating and uploading required documentation artifacts is a tedious, error-prone and not immediately rewarding process.

We propose to make the machines and software used to create the project do most of the work for us. That they should automatically gather and publish most parts of the required documentation, and to actively engage the user to enrich the resulting document with the content which cannot be automatically gathered.

Proposed structure of the workshop is:

  • 30-60min brainstorming: How can we build prototypes of automated documentation workflows?
  • 2-6 hours hacking together 1 or more prototypes of such systems

Presenter will bring a 3d-printer along with necessary hardware for setting up a basic self-documenting machine. Unless there are other conlusions made during brainstorming, we will use this as basis for prototyping a simple system. It is expected that we will need to hack code in all areas of a 3d-printer workflow. CAD, CAM, machine-control, picture/video recording, web publishing.

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