Fwd: Mentoring Program

[Andrew Mathenge]

I should have sent this to the group!

Here it is.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew Mathenge <mathenge at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 8:42 PM
Subject: Re: Mentoring Program
To: Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com>


I've been watching this thread with interest. I'm one of those
students who applied
early, but never sent in any suggestions. My first project was to take
a look at the
desktop search tools, but bzr and docbook got the best of me.

The amazing dedication of the documentation team is simply astounding. I've been
reading the discussions and it's clear that the success of Ubuntu and
the community
support is because of people like you. Matthew, Doug, Phil and the
rest of the mentors.

I'm anxiously waiting the results of this thread. I know that it will
help students, like me,
learn how to use the tools and make better contributions.

One thing I know for sure, reading introductions from prospective
documenters, that
there's a lot of interest to jump in and help. We'd like to help, but
we don't know where
to start. Yes, I know. The mentoring system is supposed to answer that
question and
if I don't take the initiative then it breaks down. The suggestions
made in this thread
are really uplifting and I'm looking forward to seeing something real
come out of it.

Once again, great job guys!

Andrew.

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 6:32 PM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Connor Imes <rocket2dmn at aol.com> wrote:
>> Matthew East wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes, that's the one thing everyone on this thread agrees on :) Our
>>> wiki pages went through a big evolution a year or so ago when we
>>> rationalised the structure, but now seems like a good time to take
>>> them up another level and try to make them simpler, better structured,
>>> and clearer.
>>>
>> I think it would be better to keep most of the information centralized
>> on one page, but very well structured, each part short, and to the
>> point.  From there you can branch out to help pages for each area of
>> documentation - even these need to be more centralized.
>
> Here is my idea for the structure of the pages under
> DocumentationTeam. The home page would be a simple explanation of the
> different areas of our work.
>
> /SystemDocumentation
>  - /Introduction - brief explanation to processes and other pages in
> this section.
>  - /Repository - explains how to get our bzr branches and work with
> bzr, also what documents exist and where to find them
>  - /Editing - explains the basics of docbook and how to edit files
>  - /Checking - explains how to view the edited files and use the
> validation script
>  - /Submitting - explains how to create a patch and file a bug or
> write to the mailing list
>  - /Tasks - list of system documentation only tasks
>
> The material from the TechnicalReview process would go in here
> somewhere (probably with "Editing") but I think it's currently a bit
> too complicated, I'd like to eliminate the "status" page (we can use
> the status tags in the xml for that if required) and simplify the
> process a bit.
>
> /WikiTeam - a series of pages moved from
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiTeam and restructured (I haven't
> yet figured out quite how yet). It would include:
>  - /Tasks - from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WikiToDo
>  - /WikiCleanup - from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/WikiCleanup
>  - /ForumImports - from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/forum
>
> /Mentoring
>
> /Translation
>
> /StyleGuide
>
> /Contact
>
> Thoughts/comments?
>
> --
> Matthew East
> http://www.mdke.org
> gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF
>
> --
> ubuntu-doc mailing list
> ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
>