Help users to bring up and operate their PlanktoScopes

[ethanjli]

This is a tracking issue for our strategic goal to improve our project's documentation, processes, and open-source community in order to help anyone who wants to use a PlanktoScope actually be able to use it. Note that some hardware documentation falls under the scope of this issue (which is about software documentation) due to the way our software interacts with our hardware.

Motivation

Currently, many people have assembled PlanktoScopes but encounter trouble with actually making them work correctly in order to collect data. We will be overwhelmed by requests for help from more people as interest in our project grows, unless we can provide more effective ways for people to help themselves and each other, and for project maintainers (e.g. Thibaut) to help people with less effort.

Goals

• For (KPI) 90% of all questions asked by at least two users on the PlanktoScope Slack channel, have a specific section of the documentation with an associated link we can paste into the Slack.

Steps

(these steps will be converted into tracking issues for epics)

• docs: Include the documentation site on the PlanktoScope for offline access #150
• docs: Make the documentation system easier to navigate & easier to maintain #143
• docs: Write a detailed getting started guide #19
• Make the PlanktoScope software easier to troubleshoot
• docs: Improve documentation contents for users bringing up their DIY-assembled PlanktoScopes #141
• Improve documentation for helping users to seek help from the community
• Improve documentation for helping community members to help each other in effective and helpful ways.
• Add a remote access system for providing remote assistance

Unresolved Questions

Information for Reference

• The four kinds of documentation