OpenWeek

[Matthew East]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Dougie Richardson
<dougierichardson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> OpenWeek is a prevalent event and is gaining a fair bit of momentum.
> We have Docs Day and a great chance to drive for new members.
>
> I'd love it if we could use this as an opportunity to promote some new
> ideas to assist transition, I understand time is short but think its
> doable in the time frame:

Let's give it a go. Even if they are not ready in time for Open Week,
we can still use them to good effect in the future.

> Create a playbook: One for the Wiki and one for the system
> documentation - just a single sheet of A4 with clear, simple guides.

Basically, a one sheet guide on how to contribute? That sounds like a
good idea. It should be possible to reuse existing material from the
wiki for this.

> IRC lessons: This doesn't need to be ready for next week but would be
> nice if we could announce we were running a series of lessons on IRC,
> much as MOTU have started doing. I've been following the MOTU lessons
> and think we could define a format of, say 5 to 6 lessons and then run
> a lesson each week. It might be prudent to repeat lessons for
> different time zones to maximise availability. I appreciate this is a
> time consuming activity, not just in lesson but in the questions and
> follow up as well as the preparation but as each of has different
> strengths I'm sure this could be manageable.

I like this as well, if people can dedicate some time to running these
sessions. We should certainly try and see what interest is attracted,
and the sessions can be fairly widely publicised around the community.

What would you see as the subject matter for lessons of this type? We
might be able to use the OpenWeek session structure as a base for
this. That way, we can reuse material prepared for the OpenWeek too.

One idea that arose out of something that one potential contributor
mentioned to me off-list was that we could do a walkthrough session to
show people how genuinely easy it is to contribute. So, we could take
a real (preferably simple) bug report, and walk the audience through
fixing the bug step by step in live time. That way, a bug gets fixed,
and people learn how to make and submit a patch. The same scheme would
work for the wiki.

Because of the fact that people might find it difficult to commit to
doing such sessions regularly, and potential contributors might not be
able to attend in live time either, we could have an example
walkthrough bugfix page on the wiki.

> Hug days: I'm sure this is applicable to both sets of documentation
> but would be particularly suitable to the community documentation,
> which I'm sure we agree has areas that need tidying up (such as the
> recently noted Mythbuntu docs). We could define an area, a date and
> put up a list of what we want to achieve then promote that day as a
> drive - exactly how the QA teams are doing.

Yes, I like this idea too - we could reduce overhead for preparing
such an event by improving our current task list and use that as a
base for the hug day. "Wiki weekends" have been organised in the past
by forum contributors, and these use the same idea, and were quite a
good way of encouraging some contribution. It would be excellent if
that could be expanded to the whole community. And of course, we have
Connor's "Summer of Documentation" too, as another brand to use to
promote contribution.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF