The quality that makes Congo so exceptionally powerful is also its Achilles' heel. Every function in Congo is just a few button presses away -- all you have to know are what exactly you want to do and which buttons you need to press. Without knowing which buttons to press, you can probably spend an extra few minutes fumbling around accomplishing the same goal in a less friendly way.
When I find myself doing something that seems more difficult than it should be, I walk over to the Consoles lab here at ETC HQ and talk to one of the guys, who time and time again blows my mind away by showing me how I can do something in just a few button presses that I had been taking much longer to do in whatever convoluted way had otherwise made sense to me. I've spoken to a number of users who have gone through the same motions.
A recent thread here in the Congo forum has sparked several conversations about the effectiveness of the existing Congo educational materials. The summary is that the user manual leaves something to be desired, the videos have been incredibly helpful to a number of people but don't go into enough depth, and Congo users are too thinly spread around the globe to benefit from additional Congo classes here or there.
Thus, the Congo How-To Library was born.
The result of these conversations is that we're brewing up some new educational materials. There are already some how-to videos on the way that have been sitting in the planning stage, there will be more videos on the way that we'll be filming near the end of the year, and now there's also the Wiki library. The tune of these training materials will be broad. There's already demand for tutorials on advanced features, and if users express an interest in more basic tutorials, those will turn up as well. Presently the focus is on features that people either don't know exist or are frequently asking questions about.
The format for the Wiki entries is going to be completely new. Not only will myself and the Congo team be writing how-to entries, but we also invite users to write their own articles as well. There's already a list on which articles we want to see. As we have time, we'll write articles and add more to the list.
If you find a topic that interests you that you know a lot about, we encourage you to go ahead and write an article, which could be one that's already on the list or one that you just think would be helpful to other users. On the flip side, if you want to know more about something that's not covered by an existing entry or resource, throw a post up here on the forums or PM me directly. The same goes for videos; the more interest we see from users for a video covering a given topic, the higher it will be a priority to get something cooked up to cover that topic.
There's already a few Wiki entries up and more are on the way as myself and others have time to write them. Expect to see a lot more content pop up there over the course of the next two months. All of the existing videos and tutorials can also be found in there.
Take a few moments and check it out -- it's a pretty cool resource that will hopefully help you Congo programmers be better at what you do,
MN
[edited by: mnicolai at 8:59 PM (GMT -6) on Mon, Dec 6 2010]
