ubuntu-doc for raring

[Elizabeth Krumbach]

On Sun, Apr 7, 2013 at 9:28 AM, Matthew East <matt at mdke.org> wrote:
> On 7 April 2013 17:06, Benjamin Kerensa <bkerensa at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>
>> I pointed out at UDS-Q that mdke was inactive and probably should step down per leadership code of conduct if he could not meet the needs of leading the team.
>
> I consider myself as having stepped down (or at least back) for a long
> time now. I haven't formally removed myself as a member of the
> Launchpad team because in the last few releases I have occasionally
> helped out with importing translations or updating Launchpad statuses,
> but the reality is that I haven't been leading this team for many
> releases now. The ubuntu-doc team has actually never had an appointed
> leader, so to speak of a leader is probably misplaced.

I think the assumption of your leadership comes from you owning the
team. Plus, many of the other members on the team are representatives
of their respective flavors, so the assumption is not generally that
they are going to be active on the Ubuntu docs themselves.

> It's better to
> speak of contributors or members. At the moment, as far as I am aware,
> all of the members are inactive. For the last few releases the driving
> force has been Jeremy, in the sense that he has been the single only
> individual working on desktop documentation for Ubuntu. This release
> he hasn't participated as actively, and no one else has either, with
> the result that the desktop documentation has not changed since the
> previous release.
>
> If anyone wants some advice on how to contribute seriously to Ubuntu
> documentation using our current toolchain, I'm sure that Jeremy and I
> will be happy to give advice to any new contributors, but the reality
> is that there are some quite complex tools (Mallard and bzr for those
> just writing documentation, and other more complex tools for those
> working on creating the published html and helping set up
> translations) and there is not much substitute for reading about those
> tools (that's the only way that we got to understand them). Dougie has
> been doing a very good job of getting up to speed with this toolchain
> recently for the serverguide, so he might be able to help too.

Improving the contributor documentation and direction from you or
Jeremy would help. Plenty of us are familiar with bzr and reading up
about Mallard is straight-forward (note: a lot of the docs still say
it's all written in DocBook, and some of the flavor docs still are)
but we can't really guess what the "other more complex tools" are, so
it's not really possible for us to read about them. Is the serverguide
toolchain the same? Is that documented somewhere?

> I don't mind spending a bit of time looking at the team's wiki
> documentation over the next few weeks to see if I can help update it,
> as it is extremely outdated.

That would be really great. Part of the problem we have right now is
that there are a number of folks eager to help with documentation but
with out-dated contributing documentation they don't know where to
begin. Please let me know if I can help here, as I'm eager to see
improvement and I'm happy to help keep the documentation process
flowing in future cycles.

I'm hopeful we can get an active team again once we update the
contribution docs, there are several highly competent contributors
with formal technical documentation experience who have stepped up to
help this cycle and I think they'd be great on this team if they knew
where to begin.

Thanks to Jeremy for sending along instructions today, that's exactly
what I needed and haven't been able to find these past couple months.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach // Lyz // pleia2
http://www.princessleia.com