RIP Mentoring Programme

[Belinda Lopez]

The training team is now holding weekly sessions for anyone who wants to 
learn more about the process of contributing to our materials.  
Currently it is the same process as the Doc Team (LP/BZR, docbook 
editing, etc.) but after this cycle we are considering moving away to a 
more end user friendly system.  New users simply do not understand the 
current process and unfortunately mentoring is not scalable as the 
project grows.  Even using IRC as a teaching/mentoring medium have not 
produced the best results b/c new folks cannot "see" what the leader's 
screen is showing and if they are trying to follow the steps in a 
session and they get different results than the leader, there is much 
confusion.

Weekly sessions are now being held in #ubuntu-training, 20:00 UTC.

Also, several community members, emmajane and popey have now updated the 
instructions as well as created several screencasts that might help new 
users better understand the whole process of working with the toolsets.  
Those are available at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Training/KnowledgeBase

There was also some discussion among the Classroom project to start some 
sessions for new contributors as well.  It might be worth pinging that 
team to see if there is any interest in working with them.

Belinda

Jim Campbell wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> One thing that I was going to do for the Xubuntu docs this time around 
> was to have a new contributor "getting started," session on IRC.  I'd 
> publicize it on the doc and translator mailing lists, and on the 
> Planet Ubuntu.  Something like this might also help the Ubuntu doc 
> team orient newer participants.
>
> By the time I get ready to have the session, I will have outlined what 
> sections of the documentation would require work, and would assign 
> particular people to small chunks of that work.  I have a roadmap set 
> up for Xubuntu docs [1] that goes through some of this, and am going 
> to set up an Assignments page similar to what I set up for the Hardy 
> release [2].  I figure if I can get four or five people to help write 
> one or two sections each, that should be enough for what we need to do.
>
> An Ubuntu-doc "welcome session," might steal some of the thunder of a 
> my proposed xubuntu-doc session, but I think it would be a good way to 
> rally up some participation, because it would allow possible 
> contributors to ask task-specific questions.  I know that we have the 
> Ubuntu Open Week sessions, but open-house/getting-started session 
> would be more task-focused than an Open Week session, which tends to 
> focus more on "this is what the doc team does . . . ".
>
> Let me know what you think,
>
> Jim
>
> [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Documentation/JauntyRoadmap
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Xubuntu/Documentation/HardyAssignments


-- 
PK