Fwd: What are we doing wrong?

[Martin Owens]

Hey Phil and Docs Team,

> Manual. No-one knows that the system docs exist. Seriously, read them.
> They think that the wiki is the closest thing we have to official
> docs.

Yes, documentation... it's got a lot of promotion, the LoCo teams system
is currently programmed to advise and help users by explaining how to
get to the wiki, forums and in some cases irc. no one is mooting that we
encourage people to use the help and support within the os, I always
figured that help and support was in context and thus useless.

> What are we doing wrong? My hunches are:

>      * People don't think to look in the System menu, or they don't
>        think that clicking the "Help and Support" button will actually
>        be helpful.

People don't often need HELP! they're normally not in a panic except
when they can't get something fundamental working like wifi (and that
when they phone people like me in a LoCo team for help). What they're
after is "learning opportunities", "supplemental information",
"explanations", better wording would go a long way to helping.

>      * People just use Google anyway, because it's faster and they're
>        more familiar with it.

Because it's the only thing they know.

>      * We aren't promoting ourselves enough.

Nope, I didn't know what exactly the docs team was doing... and I
should. As a learning team board member as a LoCo leader and as a writer
in the community where I document things on my blog. I figured you guys
were just writing wiki pages and planning on putting them into docbooks
for safe keeping.

> What do people think?

I think another problem is context. Even if we have good information to
give to people about applications they're not going to click on the OS
help and support link to get it.

Who would think that Inkscape help could be gotten from gnome help?

 * Learn Something New - A link to go next to (or below) the formal help
icon which pulls up a random page dedicated to showing the user how to
do something step by step and explaining what it's for.
 * Clean up help and support menus within apps... why is there help >
Translate this application / debug logs / etc
 * A help window decoration button. All apps should have help right?
context laden help. rename help to information in the app it's self. Do
something interesting with gnome flexibility. (wishful thinking)
 * When we get more interesting cutter based user interfaces, perhaps a
widget that shows the name and description of a random lesson for the
day?

As for contributions, I've heard a number of people said that they tried
to join the docs team but found it quite daunting with wide, amorphous
scopes, aggressive and unfriendly attitudes to making mistakes from
other members and lacking self documentation about processes and peer
review.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards, Martin Owens