Collaboration between the Ubuntu Manual and Docs Team

[Matthew East]

Hi,

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 2:33 AM, Benjamin Humphrey <humphreybc at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you don't believe that this project will be successful, then
> unfortunately that is your problem - I wrote a very nice email to the docs
> team expressing interest to collaborate and offered you basically unlimited
> use of our resources and material, but the reply I get still doubts our
> project - fair enough, if that's how you feel then you'll have to wait and
> see.

It's not that we're "not interested" in your project (to use your
words from another email). The way I would put it, at least from my
perspective, is that we recognise your enthusiasm and would like to
find a way to channel that in the most effective way to achieve your
objectives and ours. Don't forget that we have been around for quite
some years and have quite a lot of experience with documentation
projects. It's easy to simply talk about collaboration in an offhand
way, and of course projects with identical free licenses are always
able to help themselves to material created by other projects (you're
welcome to do it with our material and vice versa, provided that the
license is respected) it's a lot more difficult to actually sit down
and think about whether the projects have really got different aims or
not. Because what you've done is start a project that is creating
material from scratch using a different type of text markup in
circumstances where the Ubuntu system documentation is aimed at the
same audience and covers the same subjects. And while I do appreciate
your effort to get in touch with the team, because that's more than
others have done in the past, it's not *real* collaboration.

You're quite right that there is no concept of "official" in the
Ubuntu community and that the word is relatively meaningless. But you
do bandy the word around quite a bit in your wiki pages and you do
aspire to include the material on the Ubuntu system. If that's a
genuine aspiration, I really think you do need to engage with the
points that have been made. In particular, Phil has already expressed
concern about including a set of material with Ubuntu systems that
overlaps so heavily with the system documentation provided. I share
that concern. Another concern is that the system documentation has a
careful process of quality control, whereas the ubuntu-manual bzr
branch can be written to by any member of the ubuntu-manual team,
which is an open team with 130 members. A very open system obviously
has advantages (like our wiki) but in my opinion it's not suited to
inclusion of material on every Ubuntu system.

There have been plenty of "unofficial" documentation projects in the
past. ubuntuguide.org is one of the more prominent ones. Others are
listed here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/IndependentDocEfforts,
along with the reasons why we try to discourage them if we can. In the
end we can't stop independent documentation efforts, and all we can do
is to encourage them to contribute directly to the Ubuntu
Documentation Team and try and take on board criticisms that are made
of what we do.

So you're quite right that no one can stop your project, and no one
here is suggesting that. But I do think that if you take on board what
we are saying based on our experience, it will benefit everyone.

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