Website overview

Purpose of this website


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 (this website) containing information available to general audiences
  • An "internal" ("project") 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 and published to WebHelp Responsive

For more information

  • About the authors/creators (vrjassociates.us)
  • About other, similar projects by the authors/creators and VRJ Associates, LLC (vrjassociates.us)
  • About Perplexity AI (perplexity.ai)
  • About OXygen XML Editor (tool for handling structured documents) (oxygenxml.com)
  • About Positron AI Assistant (positron.ai)