No Subject

[Phil Bull]

Hi Anirudh,

Thanks for getting in touch.

First up, I should say that I like a lot of features of the project.
Making docs easier to write is a very welcome innovation (hence my
enthusiasm for Mallard), and building-in a way of ensuring consistency
amongst screenshots, as you have done, is also an important way of
reducing user confusion.

Here are some questions/feedback:

1. I agree that the tool would make it significantly easier for writers
to *create* screenshot walkthroughs, but what benefit will this have to
*consumers* of the tutorials? Are there any plans to subject initial
versions of the tool's output to usability testing?

2. Making documentation tools easier to use can encourage good
contributions, but it also makes it easier for inexperienced people to
create poor-quality work. You say that "less technically skilled people
will be able to share their knowledge"[1], but is it wise for people to
take advice from non-experts? How will users be able to find the
good-quality tutorials in amongst the low-quality ones which will
invariably appear?

3. You mention that fragmentation is an issue for open-source
documentation [1] (and I completely agree). Won't this project add to
the fragmentation issue?

4. How can documents be maintained and updated, for example when a new
Ubuntu version is released?

5. I'm assuming from your mockups that tutorials take a strictly linear
format. How can the user deal with multiple choices (i.e. branches in
the sequence of the tutorial).

6. Can you give examples of when a writer should and shouldn't use this
tool to create a document?

7. How will internationalisation and accessibility be addressed?

8. If a user posts a tutorial to tuxtorial.com, will there be any
transfer of rights from the user to the hosting company (i.e. you)? Who
will own or have the rights to the material and how will it be licensed?

9. Why is the project written in C#/Mono? Some distros are averse to
shipping Mono-dependent apps.

10. How will your start-up company generate revenue around this project?
Will the viability of the website depend on the success of your
start-up?

To recap, I think this could be useful to the Ubuntu Docs, as long as
we're careful about applying it in the right situations, and as long as
the technical and social issues I've asked about above can be dealt with
in a satisfactory manner. It deserves to be developed further.

Thanks,

Phil

[1] - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GSoC/2010/AnirudhSanjeev

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull