From the docteam meeting

[Andreas Lloyd]

Hi all,

as I managed to be an hour late for the doc team meeting, I didn't get
to take much part in the meeting. But I hung around afterwards and
discussed some points with Jordan Mantha which we think would be
relevant. This is just my interpretation of our discussion, though:

1. Independent doc efforts.
I put up a wiki page on how to contact such efforts and present the work
of the Doc Team:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/IndependentDocEfforts

We should consider whether we want to ask these sites to also carry a
link to help.ubuntu.com so that people will know about the official
documentation when they visit these other sites. I don't know how
willing these independent sites will be to add such a reference.


2. Help Menu relabelling.
As we discussed on the DocTeam meeting how the "System->Help" menu is
not too helpful. Why is there both Online and System documentation? What
does the Book Excerpt provide apart from clutter?
Having just one Help or Documentation menu item (along with the 2
support items and maybe a Contribute! item - see point 4 below) would
make it much more easier to get people to get to the help they need.

I would also propose that the Community Support item should bring up a
Pop-up asking whether the user wants Community support through
Mailing-list, Web Forums or Live IRC Chat - with three buttons opening
the Ubuntu-Users registration page, the Web Forums frontpage or GAIM on
the #ubuntu channel, respectively. Eventually, the Launchpad Support
tracker should be added there as well.


3. Make people aware of the Help menu!
A lot users aren't aware of the Help menu and its useful contents.
Traditionally, system documentation has always sucked, and to convince
users that this documentation is useful, we'll need to trick them. My
suggestion is that when the user is installing the system, she should be
offered the option to "learn about using Ubuntu" in the meanwhile. The
only time that the user is really keen on learning more about how to use
Ubuntu, is before they actually can play around with it.

People should get to know the docs *before* they encounter problems. We
just want them to read a bit while it installs, and notice that all the
other documentation topics are there as well - much Matthew East's
mock-up suggests [http://mdke.org/tmp/yelpTOC.png]. Once they have made
that mental note of the help being easily available, they can start
using it.

This should help avoiding situations like this
[https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/2006-July/088168.html]
where one user is actually recommending the Desktop guide - but as a PDF
download rather than the easily accessible Help menu item!


4. Help people to begin contributing! Jordan come up with the slogan
"Make it yours" when we discussed this, and his point is that the single
strongest selling point of Ubuntu is that people can actually make it
better themselves. What we need to do is make it easy for them to
contribute. The biggest problem is that most computer users aren't used
to having the opportunity to contribute to any part of any of the
software they've used. When they see a link to a "Contribute" page, they
won't touch it as they will expect it to be about doing questionnaires,
registering their software or paying a small upgrade fee or some such.

If we go through with Matt's proposal to wikify the documentation
[https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MatthewEast/HelpfulHelpVersionMinusOne], with a
direct export from the wiki to DocBook, it would make it a lot easier
for a lot of people to contribute as using SVN and DocBook directly
scares a lot of people away from contributing.

As the popularity of Wikipedia increases, that concept is becoming
well-known and understood. Basing our documentation on this would help a
lot, as the process would be much more transparent and thus give people
more incentive to contribute.

Perhaps we can split each Doc wiki page into two sections:
- the current, official documentation text which only Doc Team members
can change,
- a Comments/Suggestions/Experiences section at the bottom where users
can add changes or suggestions much like in Rosetta. The important part
would be that every help section in Yelp would also contain a link or a
button saying: "Does this work for you? Share your experiences, tips and
tricks and improve the Ubuntu documentation" which would send people
directly to the corresponding Comments section on the doc wiki.

Focus should be on making it easy for users to contribute, even it might
increase the risk of frustration spam.


Sorry that this got to be somewhat long-winded. I guess a lot of this is
what Matthew Thomas would call "Bikeshedding", but hopefully we can get
some discussion going on what kind of docs we want. If we reach further
consensus on this, I'd be happy to write out specifications on Launchpad.

Best regards,

Andreas

-- 
https://launchpad.net/people/lloydinho