idea: Wiki Jam

[Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph]

On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 1:25 AM, Gunnar Hjalmarsson <gunnarhj at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hi Charles,
>
> On 2013-12-08 06:38, cprofitt wrote:
>> In the #ubuntu-docs irc channel there was a discussion about organizing
>> a global help.ubuntu.com/community wiki jam. I think the idea is a good
>> one and we need to organize our thoughts and discuss the idea with the
>> LoCo Council and LoCo team contacts.
>
> While I'm all for that we get more structured with respect to the help
> wiki, now does not appear to be the optimal time to start such a project.
>
> It's fully three months left before the 14.04 doc string freeze, and
> Ubuntu 14.04 is not just another release, it's an LTS. I think that the
> doc team should focus on our primary task - the official docs - until then.

So we have dates in front of us:

Documentation string freeze is March 20th.

Ubuntu Global Jam weekend is April 4th - 6th.

That gives us a full 2 weeks after string freeze to get details
together for teams who want to do a jam, and we can spend time
chipping away at it until then.

> I'd suggest that any organised work with the help wiki is started only
> after the doc string freeze.

Priority-wise I tend to agree with Gunnar here. We're all excited
about work on the wiki at this point, particularly since it's
something we can all easily work on, but the 14.04 documentation will
be with us for a long time. Now that we have so many folks interested
in docs I'd really love to see effort focused on getting eyeballs on
both the server and desktop docs first.

Doug and Kevin can chime in here (should people review docs today, or
do you have plans to do some 14.04 updates first?), but I think the
strategy here should developing and publicize (social media, blogs,
planet, fridge, newsletter) a simple way for anyone (including folks
who are more wiki minded!) to review the official docs.

We now have great Single Page docs for both:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/UbuntuDesktopGuide
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/SystemDocumentation/UbuntuServerGuide

But to attract casual contributors, we need to chop out a very basic
subset of these that are for read-only review, and instruct them to
submit bugs. We will absolutely want to link them to full docs too, in
case they want to submit merge proposals to fix things, but just
getting people *reading* them will be a great first start.

An example of this is a blog post of mine from the last cycle:
http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=8443

But obviously this shouldn't live on my blog :)

I will start drafting up something on the wiki today for both server
and desktop.

All that said, I don't want to discourage work on the wiki because we
clearly have momentum right now. We all have our core competencies and
if reviewing documentation really isn't your thing, feel free to focus
on the wiki. Just want to remind folks where the team priorities are.

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