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May 25, 2004
Online help years later
Since 24 September 2003, I've chaired a working group focused on bringing online help for all of Sun's Java System server products into line for use in our common web-based sys admin console.
In chairing this group, I've come to understand partially why Jon Bosak once suggested to go off and learn General Robert's Rules of Order. The chair's role should go to someone who knows how to chair working groups. Ready, fire, aim.
It appears Microsoft created WinHelp in 1990. Help online existed before then, but WinHelp looks like the most widely recognized grandfather of what we talk about in the work group when we say online help. We target JavaHelp as the help engine, and JavaHelp systems resemble WinHelp in the same way that HTML Help resembles WinHelp.
Anyway, when asked to chair a work group recommending something online help related, I wondered, What? Why didn't we take a decision on what to use years ago?
Part of the answer may lie in how UNIX folks approach problems, which you may describe with the adverb unregimentedly. Locally, you may find lots of discipline (although I somehow doubt it). Globally, it looks like Brownian motion (maybe it is Brownian motion). When we eventually get somewhere, the roads in and roads out shall have heavy traces of our passage.
Buckminster Fuller claims to have lived off precessional effects. Precession: Systems in Motion with Respect to Each Other Involving 90 Degrees. Off on tangents. This looks different from Brownian motion, which has a random character.
Perhaps Robert's Rules of Order can channel an essentially Brownian system into a precessional system?
Posted by Mark at May 25, 2004 01:47 PM