2005-02-24 Ubuntu-doc report

[Enrico Zini]

Welcome to today's Ubuntu-doc report, covering Feb 22 to Feb 24

* The meaning of the team

[from #ubuntu-doc:]

<sivang> Liz: how did you find out about the docteam? what made you want
         getting invloved in that?
   <Liz> we had a linuxchix meeting here in sydney..and i asked about
         the documentation projects 
   <Liz> ive always been interested in doing some kind of
         documentation..only cause there is alot of it missing

This makes me think.  Suppose we are 1.000.000 users.  It's really easy
for 100.000 of us to see when documentation sucks.  It would be fairly
easy for those 100.000 to also improve the documentation, provided we
could do it in some way we feel comfortable with, like with a pen or
our favorite word processor.

However, it's quite hard for those 100.000 to actually contribute
documentation in the way documentation is usually contributed.
Traditionally, you needed the skills of the Free Software developer,
plus those of the writer, plus lots of free time.  Out of those 100.000
users, we would be left maybe in 8 or 9 people trying to create good
documentation.

With the Documentation Team, I think we're dramatically lowering the
barrier for people to contribute.  Starting from the DocumentationTeam
wiki pages we slowly built quite a wealth of guides that could get maybe
1.000 of those users into being able to contribute something.

Where our wiki guides cannot go, we can go with the mailing list and the
team members themselves, who can mediate between writers, upstream
developers and technology.

If we keep on this track, I think we're inventing something new, here.

In a few months, we did a lot.  Now we're polishing up the shiny new
Quick Guide, which looks to me like a new idea in the free software
world, and potentially very successful.  The more I read it, the more
I'd like to have more things like that.[1]

The QuickGuide is rapidly approaching completion.  I wonder what's going
to happen next.  I'm confident it's going to be something.


Ciao,

Enrico in the mood of thinking :)


[1]
I'd like to have a QuickGuide-like section for every .deb package out
there, and then Synaptic shows it to me when I ask for package details.
I want Synaptic to create a QuickGuide book for the distro I just
installed, pulling together (maybe from the network?) contents and
screenshots about all the installed packages.  This is still sci-fi, but
I think we made the idea pretty evident for others to pick it up.
--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at enricozini.org>
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