Docs team blog

[Jared Norris]

On 6 June 2011 01:24, Jim Campbell <jwcampbell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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/
>
>

My 2 cents:

I like the concept, I'd definitely add it to my reader. As long as it's not
used instead of existing infrastructure of the mailing list and irc I'd be
all for it. I think some of the things you've mentioned are better suited to
the mailing list (meeting minutes, discussions) but others (presenting
issues, featuring help projects, demonstrations, tips) would all be great to
be in a blog. I think the emphasis would have to be contributing to the
efforts and not just moving it from one medium to another (or just simply
duplicates efforts) I think it would be useful for the team and the public.

Regards,

Jared Norris
(aka head_victim)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JaredNorris
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