Ubuntu Documenter

[Phil Bull]

Hi Robert,

Thanks for the feedback, it's really useful.

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 13:40 -0400, Robert Bowman wrote:
> Long time reader, short time poster.
> I would like two point out three things that make it hard for someone
> new to contribute.
> 1.    There are no definable goals.

There are definitely definable goals, but for the most part we expect
people to define them for themselves. Part of working on the
documentation is researching and planning your own work, but for new
contributors I can see how this might be daunting.

Would a more project-based approach appeal to you? This would involve
better-defined stages of planning, design, implementation and testing,
and could be shared between several people.

> 2.    There is no documentation on how to do the documentation.

We have quite a bit of this sort of documentation on the wiki, as
Charles mentioned. If you take a look at the main Docteam wiki page and
go to the "How to Contribute" section, you should find that most of the
topics there have at least one link (generally in bold) to a more
in-depth guide to getting started with a particular form of
contribution.

I'd be interested in hearing what you think of these pages, and if you
think that they are discoverable enough.

> 3.    Short of the bug list, there are no goals that you can work
> towards.

There are quite often well-defined goals for some of the small projects
we embark upon (for example, writing manuals for upstream), but a lot of
the time our priority is the general goal of "make the documentation
presentable for the next release". It's difficult to get around this,
because the individual tasks involved in this are usually small and take
longer to explain than they do to carry out...

Thanks again,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.launchpad.net/people/philbull