OpenWeek Session

[Philip Olson]

On 10 Apr 2009, at 09:16, Emma Jane Hogbin wrote:
> Matthew East wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Emma Jane Hogbin <emmajane at ubuntu.com 
>> > wrote:
>>> Matthew East wrote:
>>> This goes back to the underlying tone we project. Learning Bazaar  
>>> and
>>> DocBook in a one hour IRC session is not possible if you are truly  
>>> new.
>>> For us to suggest otherwise leaves the tone of, "if you can't figure
>>> this out, you shouldn't be participating."
>>
>> No, you're reading too much into this. All we're trying to do here is
>> to figure out how much time we feel is appropriate for a particular
>> subject, and how much of a particular subject needs to be dealt with
>> in an individual session in order to get people started with
>> contributing.
>
> I am not reading too much into this. Our project is all about language
> and communication. Everyone needs to be very aware of both the words  
> and
> the tone. Concepts and phrases like, "simple", "trivial" and "easy" do
> not belong in the language as we talk about learning our tool chain.  
> It
> is NOT easy. There are entire college-level courses on technical
> writing--you can get an undergraduate *degree* in translation and
> interpretation. For those of us who are brilliant enough to pick up  
> the
> range topics quickly, YAY us! But let's be careful to 1. give these
> topics the respect they are due in terms of complexity and 2. make  
> sure
> that no one ever thinks that our tool chain is trivial. If it were
> trivial we'd be tripping over all the new contributors submitting
> nightly patches. ;)

There seems to be two different topics here:
  A) Learning enough to contribute content (docs/words)
  B) Learning enough to be an expert like work on stylesheets, build  
tools, etc.

Most people only care about (A) so really only need to know basic  
things like that a <para> is basically a <p>. Using a tone that this  
is easy doesn't have to demean anyone, but rather, the purpose can be  
to not scare people away. Basically it's a "Hey, adding content is  
easy, just add words and let us handle the other parts" type mentality.

I'm new here so don't know the history but as a new contributor did  
find it difficult to know what to checkout and how to check it out  
(with bzr). But to add content all I care about is basic usage and a  
trust that the validation scripts work perfectly.

Regards,
Philip