The title of this post is the subject of an email I got from Colin, an Olin College student and the organizer of Gurufest. He explained that he'd seen people in the OLPC and SL communities writing about their ongoing discovery processes and asking if he should do the same. If so, what would be the best way to document what he's learning about open-source community event organization? This was most of my email reply, with hyperlinks added in.
You don't know how happy it's making me to hear you ask these questions. Yes, please do write them up! It's useful to others, to your future self trying to do the same thing and demonstrating your mad skillz to potential donors/employers, and saves you time whenever someone asks "how can I do that too?" and you can send them a link. Where to put it? Here's my usual strategy.
Post it in one place.
For me, this is usually either... (1) my blog, with appropriate tags turned on - are you on Planet Laptop or Planet Sugar Labs? If not, you should be; look for the link on the side that says "email the planetmaster" and send them a message with the URL of your blog feed. I can help with this if you need it.
(2) is a wiki page in mainspace. Mainspace is better than your userpage because it's more findable. Think search terms and links and make sure your page is wikilinked to by other related pages. The [[Gurufest]] page, for instance, could link to [[How to run a Gurufest]], which would be a fine title.
Point everything else to that place.
Make sure everyone and everything else knows about and links to it. I already covered other wikipages. Also think about redirects. For instance, [[How to run a gurufest]] and other capitalization variants as well as [[Running a gurufest]], [[Gurufest howto]], and other phrase variants. You tend to reach diminishing returns on this pretty fast, and honestly, I'll usually make 0-1 redirects each time I make a page, but it can be useful especially if a redirect gets used a lot. See the [[Jams]] / [[Jam]] redirect, for instance, or where [[Olin]] and [[IMSA]] redirect to and are linked from (what links to [[IMSA]] vs the original page, and what links to [[Olin]] vs the original page - note that you get the "what links here" from your redirects, too).
More important are mailing lists. Send the link to any lists you think would be interested with a short summary and a call to look, like "I thought others might be interested so I wrote up this..." and a "contact me if you have any questions" bit and a "please forward."
If it's a blogpost, link to it on your userpage. If it was a wikipage, blog it and link to it on your userpage.
And then don't forget the power of pinging individuals. Email particular people you'd like to take a look at something and tell them why, and ask if they can edit/make comments/give feedback. Ditto for friends you find on IRC. It's always neat to be able to see what your friends are working on.
Probably a longer answer than you wanted, but this is what's worked for me - I'd love to hear tweaks if you have any ideas.
Any more tips/thoughts for Colin?
