Team processes for Karmic (was Re: Proposal: Create product for each derivative's documentation)

Belinda Lopez belinda.lopez at canonical.com
Wed Apr 8 15:28:25 UTC 2009



Phil Bull wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 14:21 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
>   
>> However, we should remember that writing documentation for Ubuntu,
>> Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu will inevitably require a separate work
>> product. It will also require people with different experiences to
>> contribute to each, not least because you definitely have to have used
>> the flavour that you are documenting in order to contribute. I'm a
>> huge proponent of doing everything possible to keep us coherent as a
>> team, but we do need to recognise that people are likely to end up
>> contributing to the area of the documentation that they are interested
>> in and familiar with.
>>     
>
> Of course, but it's not necessarily about code sharing. We can only ever
> share a limited amount of code. I'm talking about working together in
> terms of style, planning and training. The documentation for each
> flavour is quite different in style and structure, and I don't see why
> it should be; I have no idea about the future plans of the other
> flavours; I don't feel that we have any sort of unified "process" for
> training newcomers.
>
> In short, I don't think that we are sharing ideas and expertise between
> the different groups, or forming a consensus on the best way of doing
> things for our users. In fact, the only thing we regularly discuss as a
> team is infrastructure!
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil
>
>   
Hear, hear, Phil!  I second your call for a more unified approach,
especially in the getting newcomers to be contributors.
The Beginners Team and Classroom teams are trying to develop ways to
train new contributors as well.  There is certainly overlap not just
here but in other Ubuntu Teams as well.

I've been following the Flossmanuals.net new processes and they can go
from zero to documentation, even books in a week and in some cases
less.  It's an interesting wiki-based system that plays well with
docbook and even printing PDFs through lulu.com.  Not saying we should
go that route but tossing it out as another possible method. 
Flossmanuals itself hosts the documentation sprints and has some funding
to bring everyone into one room as well as remote contributors - the
point is that it happens fast and the quality increases with each new
book/manual they develop.

Can we set up an IRC meeting?  or I'm even happy to host a phone
conference if it will help expedite moving things forward and getting
inputs from all the teams.   It's also been proposed/discussed at prior
UDSes but still nothing concrete.

cheers,

Belinda
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-doc/attachments/20090408/7533f03c/attachment.html>


More information about the ubuntu-doc mailing list