Project details

Project goal, objectives, status, and history


El Dorado Hills Town Center (2025, by the creators)
Figure 1. El Dorado Hills Town Center (2025, by the creators)

Project overview

The El Dorado Hills community information project is a WebHelp Responsive website containing information about the Sierra foothills community of El Dorado Hills, California. It exists in two instantiations:
  • An "external" website containing information available to general audiences
  • An "internal" ("project") website (this website) containing the external information plus "behind the scenes" information relevant only to the creation and collaboration team (for example, task requests and status information, discussions about style and content, and timeline and deadline information)

The collaborators for this project ("EDH project") were its authors/creators/editors (Anna van Raaphorst and Dick Johnson), Perplexity AI, the oXygen XML Editor, and Positron AI Assistant.

Note:
Perplexity AI and Positron AI Assistant are AI services used for research, question-answering, and collaboration.

The authors created the original EDH project as a published PDF in 2003, when they were residents of El Dorado Hills and were actively researching, photographing, and writing in the area. Because they no longer live in El Dorado Hills, and the 2025-2026 project team lacks a current human "verifier," the project can't actually be "finished."

However, we hope our example, even in its unfinished state, inspires other such projects by human teams looking for better ways to communicate and collaborate, responsibly and effectively, among themselves and with AI partners.

Website overview

The purpose of the website is the following:
  • To provide minimal (yet authentic, trustworthy, and relevant) information about the Sierra foothill town of El Dorado Hills, California, to current and future residents, visitors, and other interested persons
  • To provide an example of a collaborative human/AI information project, created effectively and responsibly using the latest tools and techniques
  • To provide an example of a structured knowledge base written in DITA/xml

Current project goals (2026)

The purpose of this project is to illustrate and educate about various AI-oriented communication tasks, including how to:

  • Use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate and update community-oriented information.
  • Set up and manage collaborative (human/AI) workflows (processes where people and AI tools work together to create, review, and improve content) for current manual and semi-automated processes, and to lay the groundwork for future additional automation. (Current project collaborators are the authors/creators, Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson and Richard H (Dick) Johnson, and AI tools/assistants oXygen/Positron and Perplexity AI.)
  • Use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG—AI that finds information and generates answers) techniques and technologies based on DITA/xml (standard format for structuring and publishing information) knowledge bases (central digital libraries of articles and data).
  • Machine-translate (automatic translation of text from one language to another using software or AI) topic-oriented projects from English into another language.
  • Apply the lessons learned on this project to our next projects.
  • Investigate the possibility of expanding the scope of this project to other, similar community- and group-oriented collaborative projects.
  • Investigate the possibility of expanding the "style guide" topic.

Current project objectives and status (2026)

  • Objective: To create the El Dorado Hills community information project using assistance from Perplexity and oXygen/Positron, publish it to WebHelp Responsive (an online, mobile-friendly help system), and post it on the VRJ Associates website (vrjassociates.us).
  • Status (2026-01-05): The beta project (project that is feature-complete but is still being tested for release) is undergoing collaborative review; feedback and user testing is scheduled through January 2026.
Note:

If you have questions or comments about the EDH website or project, please contact Anna or Dick using the contact information in the footers of the vrjassociates.us or newsfromnan.com websites.

Original project objectives and activities (2001-2003)

  • Objective: To research, collect and record basic information about the unincorporated community of El Dorado Hills, California, about which little had been written at the time we started the project in 2001.
  • Title: The original document title was The El Dorado Hills Handbook.
  • Authors: Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson and Richard H Johnson, who were new residents of the El Dorado Hills community and had the time and motivation to do the project.
  • Written and processed in: Adobe FrameMaker (unstructured).
  • Published as: A printed book of about 300 pages, also available in PDF format.
  • Transformed to: In 2003, the authors created a companion website, coded in raw HTML, that contained a subset of the original content.
  • Follow-on activities (2003+): The book was self-published and sold in El Dorado County; copies were donated to local and regional libraries. The book and website were never updated: The high-tech boom predicted for the Sacramento area never materialized, and in late 2003 the authors moved back to Santa Clara County to pursue high-tech consulting and other economic and personal opportunities.

Cover of the original El Dorado Hills Handbook (2003, by the creators and Serrano/Parker)
Figure 2. Cover of the original El Dorado Hills Handbook (2003, by the creators and Serrano/Parker)

For more information

  • Link to the El Dorado Hills PDF project (2003) ("EDH Handbook (2003)" (PDF) )
  • About the authors (vrjassociates.us)
  • About other, similar projects by the authors and VRJ Associates (vrjassociates.us)
  • About Perplexity AI (perplexity.ai)
  • About OXygen XML Editor (tool for handling structured documents) (oxygenxml.com)
  • About Positron AI Assistant (positron.ai)
Note:
Perplexity AI and Positron AI Assistant are AI services used for research, question-answering, and collaboration.

About this topic

status by editor after review by Perplexity (2025-10-27):
I updated the content per Perplexity's suggestions.
request from editor to reviewer (2025-10-27):
Perplexity, please do a content review of this topic and return your comments to me as external notes.
migrated-source:
This topic was initially populated using source material published in 2003, supplemented with additional input from human contributors and AI assistants in 2025-2026. The content reflects legacy information, partial updates, and newly created information.