Docs team blog

[Jim Campbell]

Hi Chris,

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 10:22 AM, Chris <cyber.druif at gmail.com> wrote:

> Aloha Jim,
>
> I don't know what you've got envisioned with this blog? What kind of posts
> are you looking for? Things like "omg I've just edited <fill in page that
> was heavily outdated and with massive style errors> and now it's so awesome"
> or more explanatory posts like "I've noticed that <same page as before>
> needed some work. As you can see [[/page?action=diff | here]] it's style
> used to be off and the information provided was heavily out of date. How I
> fix it <insert explanatory text>".
>
> I don't know what the rest of the community thinks about this, but I don't
> see either really working. I hope to hear what the rest of the thinks.
>
> With metta,
>
> Chris Druif
>
>
Good question. What I was thinking of is stuff like the following:
- Meeting minutes
- Presenting doc-related issues to the broader community. For example,
presenting inconsistencies in GUI terminology across the ubuntu ecosystem (
ubuntu.com, askubuntu.com, a gui-developer's wiki page, etc. all using
different terms for the same gui elements). With that, there is the issue of
what terms we're using, but also the bigger issue of letting the community
know, "Hey, this is a workflow and communication problem that we need to
solve."
- Featuring cool user help projects in the open-source community. For
example, check out the adaptable gimp [0] project.
- Talking about help features and help resources available to users.
- Featuring cool work that we've done, highlighting the work of new
contributors and recognizing significant contributions by members of the
team
- Recognizing the awesome work of translators and translation teams
- Opening up discussion around user help best-practices as a means of
educating contributors about good processes and team workflows
- Highlighting "brother and sister" projects like the Ensemble documentation
and Cloud documentation projects... the Packaging Guide, etc.
- Tips on using yelp, our help browser
- Demonstrating ways of using various editors (gedit, emacs, etc.) to help
users write documentation
- Showing features of our help browser (yelp) and discussing progress in
tools development
- Examples of trivial help, help that is totally trivial and doesn't really
do anyone any good other than it is neat [1]. These would have to be safe
changes, and we would also need to provide instructions on how to undo them.
- Talk about cool help projects going on upstream (gnome, kde, xfce etc.)
and encourage people to contribute there, too.
- Interviews with documentation people both inside and outside of Ubuntu.
- Discuss doc licensing. If we encourage bloggers to use a CC-by-SA 3.0
license, we can get more "tips and tricks" blogs to let us use (at least
portions of . . . ) their content for our docs.
- Pointing to help that is receiving a lot of attention. XYZ is broken and
everyone knows it . . . here's how to work around it for now.

We would need to be careful to let people know that it isn't a support blog
for people to expect complete responses to help them fix their problems just
by leaving a comment in our blog, but I think we can make this clear.

These are just some of the ideas that I had in mind, but I think such
articles could increase awareness about our project, and help draw-in and
educate new contributors. It can also have the byproduct of also encouraging
people to contribute to our project rather than start up their own docs
project.

Jim

[0] http://www.adaptablegimp.org/w/Welcome_to_AdaptableGIMP
[1]
http://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/hrx91/i_changed_my_bash_prompt_to_be_a_little_red_heart/
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