Re-energizing Our Documentation and Support Experience

[Murray Gunn]

I also think this is a great move.  I've been on the sidelines wanting 
to contribute for 2 years, but the learning curve has been steeper than 
I had time for.  Anything that reduces that has my support.  And it's 
great to see involvement / recognition from the greater Ubuntu community.

On 22/06/11 23:37, Jono Bacon wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I hope everyone is doing well. :-)
>
> Before I begin, I want to apologize. With the Ubuntu community being
> such a large community with so many different teams, my efforts have
> traditionally been focused on other areas than the docs team. I have
> been aware of much of the work of the team, but I and my team have often
> had little time to spend helping the docs team achieve it's goals.
>
> Shortly before UDS, Jim Campbell wrote an excellent blog post about the
> docs team, and I had seen his good work before. I sponsored him to UDS
> to come and talk more about docs, and at UDS I had lunch with him to
> start growing a relationship. I committed to Jim that I want to help see
> the docs team thrive in the 11.10 cycle, and Jim and I are having some
> regular calls where we can sync up on what is going on with the team.
>
> We had a call recently and discussed some of the challenges that the
> team has and how we can break them down and resolve these issues.
>
> The key challenge from what I can see is (a) the discover-ability of
> usefulness of documentation (i.e. ensuring people can find help for the
> problems they might have), and (b) how easy it is to participate in the
> docs team and contribute to documentation.
>
> For (a), Jim and I looked at support.mozilla.com as a great example of a
> well organized and run support resource. I would love to see this kind
> of resource at help.ubuntu.com. The Mozilla Support site is run using
> Sumo which works very much like a wiki - contributors can contribute
> work to the resource, and it has a built-in translations facility (which
> is obviously important for the global reach of Ubuntu).
>
> For (b), from what I can tell, participating in the docs team is not as
> simple as it could be. On one hand there are official docs at
> help.ubuntu.com, and then wiki orientated docs at
> help.ubuntu.com/community/ - I would love to see how we can lower the
> bar here.
>
> So, I have a few proposals I wanted to share with the team to gather
> feedback on:
>
>        * We migrate to Sumo and this be the new help.ubuntu.com. This
>          would involve a migration process (setting up a test server,
>          theming it etc ensuring that authentication with Launchpad works
>          etc).
>        * We govern the site in much the same way Wikipedia works - anyone
>          can contribute if they register an account, and the docs teams
>          helps to moderate content and contributions, and lock down
>          certain pages where required.
>
> I believe that these two goals will result in a more useful
> help.ubuntu.com and an easier and more effective way of people
> contributing. Do you folks believe this could be a good step forward?
>
> I know it would be different, and change can be worrying, but I believe
> we can re-energize the docs team and our docs story with this approach,
>
> Would someone be interested in setting up a Sumo server so we can play
> with it, add some sample content, and take it from there?
>
> Thanks,
>
> 	Jono
>
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