Re-energizing Our Documentation and Support Experience

[Bodhi Zazen]

I answered on your blog as well, I think the wiki needs a lot of love and attention.

My vision is to see an Ubuntu wiki equal to or better then the Fedora or Arch wiki.

The Ubuntu wiki is in dire need of peer review, organization, and updated information.

I am willing to offer suggestions for the Ubuntu wiki if you are interested.

I also would like to see collaboration between the wiki team and the beginners team.

Specifically, the beginners team is wanting to help people move from ubuntu users to ubuntu contributes.

As you know I am primarily focused on the Forums , and my interest is to recruit people from the forums -> BT -> wiki (and other teams).

The BT would appreciate collaboration with the wiki team so that the BT can develop a core set of skills to develop in people as they transition tot he wiki team.

In addition I would ask for at least one person from the wiki team to become active on the BT. Specifically we need active, ongoing input from the wiki team to develop a strategy for the BT to recruit and train people to become more involved with the wiki. Once the program is established perhaps it would require less direct involvement with from the wiki team. 



----- Original Message -----
From: "Jono Bacon" <jono at ubuntu.com>
To: "Ubuntu Documentation Team" <ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2011 7:37:37 AM
Subject: Re-energizing Our Documentation and Support Experience

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

-- 
Jono Bacon
Ubuntu Community Manager
jono(at)ubuntu(dot)com
www.ubuntu.com : www.jonobacon.org
www.twitter.com/jonobacon : www.identi.ca/jonobacon


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