MSDP Docs and Community

Overview

To support the growth and maintenance of a global community for a robust and complex software platform, MSDP provides a wealth of resources for education and instruction, as well as a variety of ways to engage with community members across several online platforms.

Notes

To coincide with the release of MSDP 2.0, Hugh began a social media campaign to increase visibility of the application, and developed online educational material in the form of both an online manual and video tutorials hosted on YouTube.

The social media campaign posted primarily on Facebook and Twitter, as the two platforms that were popular for art communities, and expanded out to a reddit forum and an instagram account. This allowed a larger variety of users to find MSDP, and offered more ways for different users to interact with Hugh and with other creators in the platform. A mailing list was populated and maintained, allowing dedicated followers to receive update information, preview stories, and release notes at the same time that updates were posted to the main website.

Online education came in the form of both YouTube tutorials and an online manual. The YouTube tutorials were posted to the official MSDP YouTube account, and videos were created that introduced new users to the features of the platform while also exploring more advanced features and interesting combinations of techniques.

The online manual exists as part of the MSDP website, but is developed and maintained as a separate project. Like the main site, the MSDP manual was built as a static site, using Hugo. Unlike the main site, which was custom built from the ground up, the manual was created using a pre-built documentation theme. This provided several advantages, including a collection of pre-built features, and a familiar, easy-to-use layout for visitors, and made it possible to very rapidly begin work on fleshing out the content of the manual.