Request for Ubuntu Doc Leadership
Pasi Lallinaho
pasi at shimmerproject.org
Thu Mar 17 19:00:53 UTC 2016
Hello Hannie and Svetlana,
it is essential that this particular meeting gathers all contributors
from all three teams together. The intention is to about to talk about
the future of the whole documentation team, for example improvements to
the governance that are essential to make the team able to work - and
ultimately grow - again.
Doodle should try to auto-adjust the time for your timezone (it should
even mention that), but if it doesn't, it's likely UTC. FWIW, the times
are (in 24-hour format UTC):
- Friday, March 18, 15:30 UTC (that's tomorrow)
- Tuesday, March 22, 18:00 UTC
- Thursday, March 24, 14:30 UTC
Cheers,
Pasi
On 2016-03-17 19:49, Svetlana Belkin wrote:
> That might not work so well but that's maybe because i had hard time
> running meetings in the past in the doc team.
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2016, at 01:34 PM, Hannie Dumoleyn wrote:
>> May I suggest to divide the meeting with the docs team in 3 parts: 1.
>> desktop documentation, 2. server guide, 3. community help wiki (30
>> minutes each). By doing so, attendants can decide whether to follow
>> each part or not.
>> Btw, I suppose the time in Doodle is UTC?
>> Hannie
>> Op 16-03-16 om 19:30 schreef David Planella:
>>> Hi all,
>>> Apologies for the delay, which was on my end. We've been discussing
>>> the topic on our team call and we'd like to propose a meeting with
>>> the docs team. While the original e-mail covers the issue in great
>>> detail, and we've got some ideas, we'd like to get the doc's team
>>> views and come up together with a plan moving forward.
>>> I'd like to propose some dates for a meeting, to be reviewed around
>>> the end of the week to pick a date. If you are a member of the docs
>>> team or if you are interested to help, please choose the date(s)
>>> that work for you. If you are willing to attend and the timezones
>>> are an issue, please let me know as well, and I can add an extra choice:
>>> http://doodle.com/poll/dqsryhnkfwgantb2
>>> And an initial agenda (feel free to edit):
>>> http://pad.ubuntu.com/doc-team
>>> Cheers,
>>> David.
>>> On Fri, Mar 4, 2016 at 12:03 AM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at ubuntu.com
>>> <mailto:lyz at ubuntu.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello community team,
>>> We are approaching you on behalf of the Ubuntu Documentation team to
>>> ask for assistance with the issues the team is undergoing.
>>> The Ubuntu Documentation team maintains the following documentation:
>>> – The desktop documentation at https://help.ubuntu.com/
>>> – The serverguide at https://help.ubuntu.com/
>>> – The community help wiki at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/
>>> We maintain documentation for how this documentation is
>>> maintained at
>>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam
>>> The team is loosely organized in three subteams, each team
>>> taking care
>>> of one of the components mentioned above. In each team we have
>>> only a
>>> few people that can be considered active; some of those only barely.
>>> The state of all of the components can be described to be more
>>> or less
>>> stalled and in desperate the need of more contributors. With the
>>> string freeze for Documentation just a couple weeks away (March 17),
>>> at this point we risk not having updated documentation for 16.04,
>>> particularly for the Desktop.
>>> In the case of the community help wiki, the situation is even worse;
>>> not only has it encountered spam attacks lately (which only mean
>>> more
>>> work for the admins, who have been manually applying documentation
>>> "patches" that contributors send to the ubuntu-doc mailing list), it
>>> also has a lot of content that is completely outdated, useless and
>>> unstructured. Due to the spam attacks, most community members can't
>>> currently take any action to improve the situation.
>>> Following a meeting with the Community Council[0], we have begun to
>>> identify what we feel the team needs, both in the short and long
>>> term.
>>> We believe one of the major underlying issues to this situation
>>> is the
>>> teams inability to make decisions. The active and not so active team
>>> members all have their own opinion on which tasks are sensible
>>> to take
>>> on a certain component. This is especially problematic as
>>> sometimes we
>>> have had volunteers signed up to do the work, but the team has
>>> wanted
>>> to consider the issue further, ultimately stalling the process. When
>>> most efforts to improve the situation seem to be in vain, it is no
>>> wonder the team is not attracting new contributors either.
>>> As the Documentation team does not have a leader to steer the
>>> overall
>>> direction, there is no way to easily resolve the problem.
>>> Additionally, for various reasons, nobody from the current
>>> contributors is willing to step up and take the leadership position.
>>> Our request and recommendation for the community team at
>>> Canonical is
>>> to bring some leadership to the team from outside of the team.
>>> Ideally, the person would be a Canonical employee who would have
>>> part
>>> of their paid work assigned to working with the Documentation
>>> team. We
>>> think the request is fair considering the documentation is important
>>> and useful to many Ubuntu users and thus valuable to Canonical.
>>> We believe that a stable, fresh and adequately objective leadership
>>> could help the team resolve the underlying issues and ultimately,
>>> start growing the contributor base again. As part of and in addition
>>> to leading and guiding the team, the leader could take on the
>>> following tasks:
>>> – Work as a mediator with the members to resolve disagreements, be
>>> able to reach a consensus and get along with the work
>>> – Work with other Canonical employees, encouraging them to take part
>>> more in writing documentation, especially with the components
>>> they are
>>> working with themself
>>> – Work with the Canonical IS team to resolve technical difficulties
>>> the community help wiki is experiencing
>>> We feel their role as a leader on this team would not be because
>>> they
>>> work for Canonical, but because they are able to do the
>>> organizational
>>> work that is needed. Anyone able and willing to do this would be
>>> welcomed by us and the rest of the Documentation team. It's simply
>>> come to a point on the team today where we are not able to fill this
>>> role with a volunteer contributor.
>>> We do not think that the recommended arrangement has to be permanent
>>> unconditionally. Building up a team and getting it working by itself
>>> sometimes takes only time. We hope that with the leadership, the
>>> team
>>> can build up the contributor base and ultimately, find a new leader
>>> from within. If a leader is nominated, we will happily schedule a
>>> checkup meeting to see how things are going, if there are other
>>> actions that should be taken to grow and build up the team and
>>> if the
>>> outside leadership is required any more.
>>> Finally, we'd be happy to chat with anyone wishing to take on this
>>> role about the history of the team to give them some context for how
>>> we got to where we are. The Documentation team has always been quite
>>> small and has struggled to get contributors, but it was with
>>> this LTS
>>> release that we have finally hit a breaking point.
>>> Sincerely,
>>> Elizabeth K. Joseph (pleia2) and Pasi Lallinaho (knome)
>>> [0]
>>> http://irclogs.ubuntu.com/2016/03/03/%23ubuntu-meeting.html#t17:00
>>>
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>> --
>> ubuntu-doc mailing list
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>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-doc
> Svetlana Belkin
> A.K.A: belkinsa
> User Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/belkinsa
>
>
--
Pasi Lallinaho (knome) » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project » http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member, Xubuntu Website Lead » http://xubuntu.org/
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