Instructlab Docs Working Group Meeting Summary 12/18

[Ali Maredia]

Hi Instructlab Community,

Today the docs working group had a discussion we wanted to make the community aware of.

The discussion started when I showed updates I had for the documentation working group meeting.
Based on the prior work by Christian Hiemes, I realized we were in a good place to use sphinx to auto-generate docs for the configuration variables and the Instructlab core CLI commands and flags.

This led to a much broader discussion about the layout of the various "docs" websites we have or want to have. On the call we had mentioned many different personas we were each building docs for.
One is what we called the "executive", that is someone interested in learning what Instructlab is at a high level.
Another was what we called the "user", who is someone interested in getting started and running Instructlab or contributing to the upstream model.
The third was a persona we called the "developer". This is the persona that we have a lot of opportunity to improve docs for, and the persona we saw as wanting to understand all of configuration options, CLI flags/commands, or consume the various Instructlab libraries (ex: instructlab/sdg).
We had also discussed a "curious" or "community" persona that wanted to dig into all of it.

We realized that we need to re-evaluate our information architecture, and then our user-facing websites from there.
That is not going to be something we can do over the course of a week or two but might rather take weeks or months. This will be a longer running initiative for the working group.

Finally, we decided we're going to be iterative about making improvements at least in the short term.
We don't want to delay having a website with the auto-generated "developer" docs, possibly at developer.instructlab.ai.
The same goes for adding docs for the non-core Instructlab libraries.

Stay tuned for more after the New Year!

- Ali