Introduction

Richard Johnson nixternal at ubuntu.com
Sat Oct 28 04:28:29 UTC 2006


On Friday 27 October 2006 22:14, Matthew Copple wrote:
> Good evening!
>
> I am Matthew Copple. I'm rather new to Ubuntu, but I have used Linux since
> 2000. Since 2003, I have pretty much lived my home life on a Linux
> workstation. Until now, I have contented myself with being a passionate
> Linux advocate and offering a helping hand to new Linux users. However, I'd
> like to get a little more active and contribute a bit more.

You are definitely barking up the right tree if you want to contribute, 
because we can definitely use the help.

> I considered packaging or doing some development work, but I have almost
> enough engineering talent to program my cable box, and not much more. I
> have a smattering of perl, a smidgin of bash, and a pinch of php, but not
> enough knowledge of anything in particular to be able to build applications
> with it.

This type of work comes with time. If you hang out for about 6 months around 
the Ubuntu community, especially on IRC, you will be a MOTU :)

> I can write, however. I spent the last 18 months writing a paper a week to
> complete my bachelor's degree (ten years after I started it!), so my
> writing skills are about as sharp as they will ever be. In one of my
> several previous careers, I wrote quite a bit of training documentation
> using docbook-sgml and its toolchain, so I have exposure to both technical
> writing and the vagaries of Docbook.

Hey Jordan, here is a DocBook-SGML guy that you can use, as I believe you were 
trying to work with this in the past on something. Anywho, we use 
DocBook-XML, which from my understanding is actually easier than SGML.

> If you have something that needs to be worked on, I'll be happy to tackle
> it. Should I just pick something interesting from the svn repo and start
> writing on it, or are there specific priorities that an experienced Linux
> user, but rather new Linux technical writer, might get started on?

We will have a ton to work on starting in the next month or so. We are going 
to be preparing for 7.04 release (The Feisty Fawn), and one of our agenda 
items is a possible rewrite of all our documentation. Hoping this will get 
rid of some of the staleness that as acrued over the years.

> Before I conclude, I just want to say "thanks" to the Ubuntu development
> community. I have used every major Linux distribution, and a lot of minor
> ones; among all those groups, I have found the Ubuntu community, both
> developers and users, to be the friendliest and most helpful. And the
> software rocks, too. :)

Actually, I think you are the one who needs to receive a "Thank You". Thank 
you for contacting us and providing us with some incite on our skills that 
could definitely be usefull around here.

> Thanks for reading. I look forward to contributing where I can!

I am sure some more of the team will get on and say hello as well, give them a 
couple of hours, as most of them are in the Europe local. Just in case you 
haven't run into the documentation team info, have a look around 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam. Around here, what usually happens, 
is you will work on some documentation, and email patches and what not to 
this list. Any questions, feel free to ask them.

Welcome to the community Matthew! If you get on IRC, we are all hiding in 
#ubuntu-doc

-- 
.:Richard Johnson
.:nixternal at ubuntu.com
.:ubuntu.com .:kubuntu.com .:edubuntu.com .:xubuntu.com
.:http://nixternal.ubuntu-rocks.org
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