Future direction of Ubuntu Documentation/Meeting times

[Robert Stoffers]

All,

There was a lot of talk at the meeting about the direction of
documentation for the release of Breezy and beyond. Unfortunately Matt
Galvin and several other key docteam members were unable to attend, so
the decision was made to continue the discussion on the mailing list.

Matthew Paul Thomas presented his vision of the front screen (of yelp),
which would be a new book. There are several issues in doing this
however, such as:

	a. Deep linking into our existing docs, users would become lost
	b. Every time we changed something in our docs, we would have to
	   manually update the yelp front page, creating more work and a
	   potential administration nightmare
	c. The plan included writing bit and pieces that were included 
	   with the book, potentially being a duplication of effort 

It was also suggested that we combined the FAQ Guide and the Yelp main
page to become one document. The outcome would be that the FAQ guide
would be THE Ubuntu documentation with a pretty face. It would also mean
that people would seldom use any other Ubuntu documentation, such as the
User Guide. This also however brings its own problems:

	a. No other documents would be/need to be referenced by Yelp
	b. We potentially are wasting a lot of hard work
	b. Licencing issues

Matthew Paul Thomas wants to drop the GFDL and remove BY-SA from the
Creative Commons licence as he believes that Debian will not accept our
documentation any other way. I take particular issue with removing the
BY part of the Creative Commons licence, it means that Debian or anyone
else can remove our names from our hard work. We would also have to seek
permission from the original authors of ubuntuguide.com to change the
licence they initially allowed us to use, there is no denying where the
FAQ guide came from (and pulling our changes will be messy).

Whats the easy solution to all this? My idea was to simply have a page
listing our documents, with a quick one/two liner on what each document
was about underneath, eg:

Ubuntu User Guide
  An in depth book about Ubuntu...

FAQ Guide
  A list of common questions users have and the answers to those
  questions.

Ubuntu Administrators Guide
  Aimed at system administrators, covers installation, administration
  and configuration of Ubuntu as a server or workstation in a networked
  environment.

etc, etc...

Obviously it would need some work, but it is simple, easy to administer
and showcases all of our documents. There are no licencing issues or
deep linking either. There is still a potential for duplication of work
with this idea, but if we stay within scope this should rarely occur.

So what direction should we take? We need people to speak up now with
their thoughts and suggestion on where they would like to go with this,
please post them to this mailing list. I will also add this to the
agenda for the next meeting.

Finally, I suggested in the meeting that Docteam Meetings should be
moved to Friday, as this fits in much better with work. There weren't
any objections to this, but due to lack of numbers again nothing was
decided. I am unable to attend any more meetings unless this change is
made :). Please post your thoughts.

Regards,

Robert Stoffers