plans for Feisty

[Andreas Lloyd]

Richard Johnson wrote:
> On Thursday 26 October 2006 02:40, Matthew East wrote:
>> I'd love to hear people's ideas on these, and their own ideas about
>> Feisty documentation. Let's get going already!
>>     

I submitted the topic-based help spec, and that's the one I think will
be central. As Rich suggests, it will require a majow rewrite of the
docs, especially since we also want to include the book content.
Hopefully, switching to a topic-based system will allow us to solve the
help usability issue as well, particularly by further improving the Yelp
frontpage (I did this mock-up for Don a while back:
http://eskar.dk/andreas/tmp/yelp%2520contents.html, I hope I can get him
interested again).

Also, we need to make the in-team communication better, and make it
easier for new members to get involved. Our team is very much a team
that suggests casual involvement when people solve a problem and want
that solution to get a wider audience. There are several parts to this:

* Integrating the docs directly with the wiki. This will work well with
the topic-based structure, and will hopefully be feasible through the
moin2docbook work that Mirkko did for the Summer of Code. In this way,
readers will be able to make comments and suggest changes directly to
the wiki pages linked from the documentation. That's one of the
strongpoints of the Forums that I think we might learn from and use to
our advantage. Of course, this will require that we figure out a good
Wiki QA process. But potentially, it can make it possible for a lot more
people to get involved. Anybody can edit a wiki. I've done all of the
editing of the Contribute to Ubuntu doc in the Wiki, and people have
been quite good at making their changes there directly.

* Rich's ideas of spreading responsibility (or at least clearly
documenting our procedures for adding new documents to the final package
and creating the .po files for the translation) is central to making
sure that the team can fulfil its obligations no matter who takes care
of them.
* More meetings, more publicity. More calling focus to ourselves and the
cool things we do. More cooperation with all the various renegades out
there doing their own documentation (and goodness, there is a lot of them!)

Anyway, I'm going to the Mountain View summit, and will try and get
people interested in this.

Hope to see some of you guys there.

Andreas

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