[UbuntuWomen] GlobalJam, who's going?

[Matthew East]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 6:16 PM, Elizabeth Krumbach <lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 2:04 AM, Matthew East <mdke at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> Sorry, I've only just noticed this - awesome! How did the session go?
>> Was there any feedback that the ubuntu-doc team could benefit from?
>
> Possibly. Early on in the jam Jono and I had a chat about how we can
> lend support to the docs team and he dropped an email to Jesse of
> -docs and Benjamin of -manual about collaborating more. I'd really
> like to see the profile of the project raised in the next cycle, you
> guys do great work and I know you always need more volunteers.

Yes, that's something I'd like to focus on too. In particular in the
light of the popularity that the Ubuntu Manual project has gained with
contributors during this release cycle, I'd like to understand whether
it would be possible to leverage that type of enthusiasm for
documentation ourselves, without compromising our quality control. I
still believe that the Ubuntu Manual project has all the same aims and
scope as we do, just with more enthusiasm and slightly different
tools/processes. I don't believe those tools are necessarily easier
either. I think that the key difference has been publicity for the
project that has been generated, and greater immediacy in the wiki
pages about how to contribute. But again I'd appreciate input from
others.

> The main things that came out of discussions with folks at the meeting:
>
> 1. There is still confusion about wiki.ubuntu.com vs
> help.ubuntu.com/community ("and wait, there is doc.ubuntu.com too?").
> Not sure that the docs team can do anything about this, but the
> confusion does exist.

That's interesting, although this is more of a concern for our users
rather than our contributors, I think. It's definitely a problem - for
example the fact that the Ubuntu One team has chosen to put their
documentation on wiki.ubuntu.com is first hand evidence that things
are not clear.

If our users aren't clear on where the documentation can be found,
then that's definitely an issue. I think probably the only thing that
could be done about this, now that wiki.ubuntu.com's frontpage is
pretty clear on the issue, is to do something different with the theme
of wiki.ubuntu.com, to include something in the header that makes it
clear that it is for team coordination and not for documentation.

> 2. While contributing to things like IRC and forums is easy - indeed,
> some people even write tutorials in these mediums (-classroom
> sessions, forum threads with how-tos and guides) - it was expressed
> that the path to contributing to the docs team, or even to
> h.u.c/community, was unclear and "seems difficult." So there is a
> tendency to look around for a bit and then just go the "easy" route of
> posting documentation on their blog or in a forum. I'd be happy to
> discuss this more with the docs team and offer some "outside
> perspective" if it's deemed worthwhile.

Yes, I think it would be. As an insider, I do think that our landing
page on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam and the other ages
there are pretty clear, and I sometimes wonder whether the problem is
that people are never getting that far. I may be wrong about that
though. Perhaps people lose interest in reading after a short time,
and need more of a quick introduction to contributing which gets their
hands dirty with docs before they get too bored.

What do others who have tried to contribute to docs think about this?

> http://people.ubuntu.com/~lyz/FindingHelpfulResources.pdf

Ok, that's nice - although more about finding help than writing it.

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