Ubuntu: A Beginners Guide

[Matthew East]

Dear all, and Benjamin in particular,

I'm also guilty of coming to this discussion quite late - it's been a
busy holiday period! Sorry for the delay.

In principle I tend to agree with some of the things that Richard has
said. For us as the Ubuntu documentation team, one of the key points
is to keep any projects that we participate in focused and to limit
the amount of duplicate work done. The system documentation
(reproduced on the website) that we already produce for Ubuntu and its
derivate flavours is already aimed primarily at new users / beginners.
To the extent that it isn't achieving that aim, I'd really like to see
new contributors trying to suggest improvements to the existing
documentation and sending in patches. Many of the "justifications" on
the ubuntu-manual wiki page are directed at (actual or perceived)
defects in the system documentation which are best addressed by
working on the existing documentation (although I'm not convinced that
all of the criticisms are valid ones).

However, I do think that the idea of a single manual for documentation
does address a "gap in the market" that our documentation doesn't
currently address. That is because our documentation is currently
presented in topics, and not as a single manual. We don't currently
have a single printable manual that we put out.

It's a conscious choice that we made to present our on-screen help in
topics. The usability gurus tell us that topic based help is a much
more effective way to present help to users
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HelpfulHelp) and the documentation teams for
the other principal operating systems seem to feel the same way.
Having said that, it isn't ideal for users who want to sit down and
read a book all about how to use Ubuntu. For that, a printable book or
manual is needed. The historical reason that the documentation team
hasn't produced such a manual in the past is because of lack of
resources. It's more important for us to produce on-screen help than
it is to focus on books, and so far, we haven't been able to do both.
There are books already out there. Some of them can be downloaded
(Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference) and some of them can't (The
Official Ubuntu Book).

In the light of the stated objectives of this project, my
recommendation would be to build on the work done by existing
projects. I'm not attracted to the idea of writing a new book from
scratch and I think that the work involved simply cannot be
overestimated. Even updating such a book is a huge enterprise. I think
the best candidate is to seek to build upon the Official Ubuntu Book
(because that particular project carried an "official" tag bestowed by
Canonical). Given that it has a (nearly) free license, there are two
possible ways to build on that work, as usual with open source
projects. The first is to try and contribute to it directly. That
would mean trying to persuade the authors and publishers of the
Official Ubuntu Book to open contributions to the community, to merge
changes put forward by contributors promptly and regularly, to publish
it online as well as in hard copy, and to establish a community around
the book that would drive it forward and keep it updated regularly.
That might be difficult, but equally, you never know. See also
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17638/

Alternatively, it could be forked so that the text would be taken and
updated or built upon, and the resulting product published. I don't
see anything stopping that from happening: the publisher should be
willing to give up the text of the book in electronic format, given
the open license. Even copy-typing it would be a lot more efficient
than writing a book from scratch.

I remain of the view that the documentation team's primary aim should
be to maintain the on-screen help, and therefore that the production
of a printable book could only ever be a subsidiary aim of the group.
In the past, as Phil has said, we've never succeeded in maintaining
both. However, if there is enough interest in it, it may succeed.

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