Strategic Refocus (was: Difference between the User's Guide and the Gnome User's Guide)

Mon Jan 17 15:19:30 UTC 2005

On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 12:14:48PM +0100, Christoph Haas wrote:

> he "lost interest in doing most of this because of no one being able to
> decide what we needed to do and everything getting changed constantly".
> I admit that this has changed lately. Just that not everyone has
> noticed.

I think so, too.  I tried to follow things and I think that we came out
of the mess with something which is lean and potentially fun.

The only problem left is the language of some pages, that occasionally
looks a bit too much professional to be fun.

I have a problem in spotting those boring bits because I've been
following the various discussions, so I need help there: if someone
spots something that looks nasty, please mail me a reference and I'll
take care of it.

But what you mention is still true: how to let us know of what we got
now?

Only Sean, Plovs and partly me really followed the discussions, and most
of the others surely got lost at some point: I was lost as well until I
had to load everything into my brain for the wiki gardening.

So, what do we do?

An IRC meeting in which we present the current state of things?  That's
yet another loss of time talking about ourselves: I don't like it.

Or, more people just start writing something as if it were the first
day, asking in the list when something is unclear, then seeing what
happens.  I did it for the Calculator QuickGuide chapter: it's been
quite nice, actually!

> merge the A document with the B document". :) But still we are using
> more technology than absolutely needed to accomplish our jobs IMHO.

Which is still fine if we can just not care about it and let Sean
maintain it :)

> new ideas. This happened once to often so that people now sit around and
> seem to wait for the next boom.

I'm curious to see what the next boom could be, though: Sean has been
thinking at about everything, so a new innovator joining the list will
need to have quite a lot of fantasy :)

And I think we all need to acknowledge that Sean has been helping a lot
solving some real problems that we had, such as the licensing issues,
linking accross documents, doing a good research on the quality
tradeoffs when taking screenshots and lots of other things we don't need
to care about anymore.

Looking at the whole thing now, I find that contributing content is
easier now than before, because many decisions have been taken and there
is practical documentation about most jobs.

If I had to give a suggestion to Sean about doing the same
reorganization in the future, that would definitely not be "don't do
it", but rather "try to get more into the local people first, so that
you can start improving from relevant needs, and work speaking their
language".

But Sean is not that disconnected from the rest of the group anymore, I
think, and the last writing of the DocumentationTeam pages shows it.

> And of course we have psychological effects here, too. Nobody else
> writes anything - why should I? (If everyone but me would be writing
> then I'd get my butt on the chair and work late to not look like an
> idiot.) Nothing has been written for months - why start today?

That's probably what's really happening.

So, let's get out of that mud: how many chapters of the QuickGuide do
you want me to write before you do your first one?  Name your price and
I'll do it.

> > Would you expect broken code from the devel team?
> Yes. After the fifth Hoary update in a row broke my notebook
> installation. :)

Another good point you are making.  Hoary is broken at the moment
because they are pulling in new content; then they'll freeze the content
and fix it, polish it and take it to perfection.

We instead build railways and motorways without villages around.  It's
make it easier to build villages now, but there is to be seen if people
want to go and live there.

The good thing is that it's easier to build villages now:

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocteamProjects
  keeps track of what we want to do: questions such as "why don't we
  merge A and B" and "what is the difference between A and B" shouldn't
  be asked anymore, or if they are asked, we can point to these pages.

http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DocteamWork
  records how to do things in case we don't know or we forget.
  TakingScreenshots and DocteamStepByStepQuickGuide are cool foolproof
  guides for the lazy.

Writing contents now can be easy and enjoyable again, IMO.

> > In light of the fact that people seem to be stuck or not sure which
> > way to go I have made the suggestion to use vendor drops (90% vendor -
> > 10% Ubuntu).
> I'm curious. But I think I don't have enough information yet. That's
> what I found online:
> http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/ch07s04.html
> Questions:
> - how do we get the documentation into our structure?
> - how do we keep in sync with upstream?
> - which upstream documentation is available that fits our documents
>   that we work on? (e.g. is the help file of every application in the
>   "System administration" menu available so I don't need to rewrite it?)
> Perhaps you can paint a virtual picture of how this would work for us.
> I'm not experienced with branches either. Just the boring theory. :(

I've usually felt like we should coordinate with the rest of the devels
since they're doing something similar as well, and we risk having to
merge both with upstream and with the devels; however I've never seen
cool handy solutions coming out.

During one of the BOFs, jdub mentioned that the Gnome guys are putting
some infrastructure in place to help with branding; however none of us
knows much about it.

I'd be tempted to say "let's experiment with these vendor drops and see
if we like them", but then we fail to the temptation of nerdly
experimenting and we get frustrated of not getting things done again.
So it may make more sense to say "let's try that after we got the Quick
Guide done", as that's one of the goals for Hoary and it has a deadline.

In the meantime, I'll ask jdub for some more pointers about this Gnome
branding thing.

> Perhaps others add something about their motivation so we know where the
> shoe pinches. Perhaps in half a year we all laugh about it and are
> writing documents like hell. A man can dream. :)

I'd bet on much much less than half a year!

Ciao,

Enrico

--
GPG key: 1024D/797EBFAB 2000-12-05 Enrico Zini <enrico at debian.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20050117/4606ae90/attachment.pgp>